


Beyond Choice

by kasugayamaisforlovers



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Compliant, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Treasure Island crossover, a SilverMadi story through and through, cannon-typical closeted SilverFlint, canon-typical violence (though mostly implied), chapters tagged with appropriate CWs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:35:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 28,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28990089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kasugayamaisforlovers/pseuds/kasugayamaisforlovers
Summary: A character study of one John Silver and one Madi Scott. A story of how they came to be lovers and how, despite great adversity, they should remain so. A throughline from Sails to Treasure Island.
Relationships: Madi/John Silver (Black Sails), McGraw & Silver & Madi (non romantic)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	1. Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Massive thanks to my beta reader, Sasha <3

He looks between the wooden bars of the cage and tries to see the things that are familiar about this place. The island is green and brown and sweltering under the beating sun. The dizzy sleepiness he feels is only negated by the persistent feeling of danger. He looks out across the dirt path streets, no wagon ruts just foot trails. People. People, that’s one. People are mostly the same in his experience and place, nationality, and race seldom change that. Town: that’s two. A town’s, a town’s, a town. There’ll be some sort of church, a market, someone in charge--a queen, apparently, according to Gunn. He wonders about the hierarchy in this place beyond that, tries to spot some kind of sumptuary code in the way people dress. If he can understand which block to push he thinks he can survive this place. 

There’s an overall uniformity of dress here, or rather lack thereof. In that way the people here dress like the people of Nassau. They wear their stories on their backs. Yellow dyed linen wraps their heads, or a crust of white paint, a bicep band of leather and bone, sandaled feet or barefoot, bald, braided or kinky-headed. Some bear scars ritually carved and others were carved by no-doubt less voluntary factors. These people are maroons but he has to believe that they are people first. His eyes pan and pan looking for someone who knows his way around this place and these people. 

The slight bow and deference of people in the street catches his attention. He expects to see the queen, but it is another woman that steps out into the sun. She stands black and luminous like defiance to the sweltering gold sun. He’s seen her before when the crew was first rounded up. She rests a hand on the shoulder of an elderly man. The man nods and they exchange words Silver is too far to catch. This woman makes several stops. She is tall and carries herself with grace and assurance that belie her power. 

She looks up. Her eyes are dark even in the light and he finds himself looking before he knows exactly what he’s looking for. She has, in every regard, the face of a woman. She is soft slopes for head to feet. He returns to that face, unpainted yet more like a painting than any he’s seen. Why that bothers him he can’t say. It tickles against several ideas too complicated and too competing to articulate at once. He can’t place the dryness in his throat. It’s thirst, probably. Need of water. 

“What about the other one?” he asks, nodding toward this woman. The daughter, Gunn replies, the queen’s daughter. A princess. Somehow that feels true. Several of his half-thought ideas unspool themselves from the tangle of his mind. It’s  _ her,  _ this daughter. This place has too many feet, too many eyes, too many people to be unified unquestioningly under one queen. He says this to Flint and although the captain is unswayed, Silver feels he is right as he says it. She is the block he must topple to escape this place. 

“There is a sympathetic ear out there...we just need to find it.”  _ And we’re looking right at her.  _ Flint sighs but says nothing. Silver leans against the bars of the cage, watches the princess commune with the elderly man and another woman. It’s her. He can feel it. He doesn’t know how he knows but he knows. He wonders what he’ll have to do to gain an audience with her. The elderly man bows and she walks back the way she came, right into the sun. His eyes follow her long after she is gone. 

\--

For days his mind stacks variables: the distance to the ship, the health and number of his men, Flint, the number of maroons. He turns these things over and over in his mind. Everyone is counting on him for a means of escape. He’s thinking. He’s trying. He’s looking out over town, listening to the pad of feet as people--mostly men, come and go. He’s learned to divert his eye contact. He’s been scum before and he doesn’t mind playing the role now if it means avoiding a beating. So it’s feet and thoughts and sun until his eye line is pulled by the swish of a familiar skirt. Following the dusty swish, he sees her. 

He’s seen her in snatches and glimpses over the last few days--head high, shoulders broad, bigger than herself but always graceful. There is a disquietude on her face now. Her chest heaves. Her hands are knots in her long skirt. She looks...anguished. He can feel the weight of it in his chest as her wet eyes stare at the floor. All plans fall aside as he wonders at her.  _ What’s happened?  _

It takes him several heartbeats to catch up to the conversation Billy’s started. The escape plan. Flint. The escape plan. Getting out of here… His mind knocks loudly for his attention but other muscles pull his attention. He wills sound and breath and thought back. It takes longer than it should to shift his mind back to the pragmatic realm of solutions and reality. He can’t tell if the disquiet he feels now is his own or the lingering memory of the princess’s face. 

\--

He’s half asleep. This may be as asleep as he is able to be given the circumstances. He wiggles against the sharp push of cage bars in his shoulder. Eyes closed, he spins up shards of plans for getting the princess’s attention, getting the queen to let them go. Flint. Ship. Jungle. Escape. It’s a wheel and his mind spins around and round. It’s become a game that suppresses the gnawing hunger in his gut. It’s a game to mesmerize himself into sleep. But he’s bored and frustrated now, instead he plays back the epiphanies of the day. 

The maroons must have tortured the story of the storm that crashed the  _ Walrus _ out of enough men, because they haven’t taken anyone else today. That’s good: morale’s been on the out and out and they’ve lost more men in the last two weeks than he would have thought possible. They’re down to half of their crew between the show of force in Carolina, the storm, the starvation, and now this… at this pace they won’t have enough to sail the ship even if they do get out of here. But he pushes that thought far away. 

If they escape. He snorts. If the fate of Gunn’s crew is to be their fate as well, they can expect hard labour. It’s not death. Not yet at least. His eyes flutter open again. He can’t stand not knowing, not being in control. His fate is entwined with so many men now that there is no clear path to tomorrow. He chews at his mustache, bites the broiled flesh of his lips. It was simpler before. But he pushes that thought far away. He needs to get the crew out of here. He rolls to his side gasping as rough hands grab him. 

_ Is this it? Is this how I die? _ The thought screams out in his head. He kicks and thrashes as two men drag him up.




Since the pirates were captured on the coast she's felt eyes on her. Her mother watches her with eyes both scared and warning, like she can hear Madi's unspoken questions. Madi takes wide loops around the village, every time she passes the prison encampment it is from a distance. She is allowed to sit in on her mother's counsel circle as information on the stranded men trickles in. She’s careful not to look too interested. Still...these Nassau men are the closest thing to her father’s world that she’s ever seen. 

This crew, unlike the last, were not found shipping slaves. Madi wonders if that makes them different. She’s not naive. She listens to the words of those who have known chains. The island has seen pirates and slavers and seen no difference. Madi wonders if this time is different. Still, she is cautious. She cannot speak to those stranded men that her mother has picked for death, nor can she speak with the men sent to chop and fell and cut the heavy lumber for new buildings in town. Better to imagine those men as gone. At the top of the slight incline there are cages of men, men to whom she could speak… She thinks about this as she walks. 

She feels the eyes of her people as they turn between the captured men, her mother, and herself. Her people wonder what will be done about these men. Her people wonder if this shipful of men will mean the discovery and then the doom of this place. They wonder if they will lose another home. Madi too wonders about these men, but she wonders about  _ their  _ home. She wonders about her father’s place among them. She wonders about Nassau.

Madi listens when she is spoken to and knows what she does not know. She does not know what it is to lose home. This island has always been home. Still, she can taste the despair as she watches her people look at these men and remember the homes they were robbed of. Madi does not know the fatigue of hard labour, the confusion that comes without shared language, or the heartbreak of forced separation from loved ones.  _ I don’t know my father, _ she can’t help but think. She does not know these men, but knows she  _ could.  _ She continues to wonder about Nassau and the pirates walking wide circles around the village. 

Loitering amongst her people she smells the stink of fear and the heat of anger. It comes from the caged men also. She half listens to a conversation between elders about farming. She does not fear these men as her people do. She does not fear battle. She does not fear leaving this place, her home. She fears not knowing and missing the chance to know. She listens to the idle chit chat of the sun reddened men above. She feels the eyes of the pirates. Scornful. Fearful. But also...curious. She recognizes the curiosity in a pair of blue eyes that stare back. She returns the look and in the hairsbreadth of a moment she sees something else, something in the gaze that she can't place. She turns away, the look suddenly too direct.

When she is alone she plays at what ifs. What if her father knew these men? What if they’ve worked together? Her mind notifies her that the shade of blue in those eyes before was like shallow water over white sand. It is an answer to a question she doesn't realize she's asked. She blinks and the words of  _ Don Quixote _ refocus on the page. She reads and rereads the paragraph. Why curiosity should be so foreign a look as to be notable she doesn’t know, but she hasn’t seen the look she saw in those eyes before now. She feels pulled to it. Perhaps it is the light of the elders leading her to answers about her father?

Perhaps she is telling herself what she wants to hear to pursue her curiosity. She tries to focus on her book. Eventually the words on the page float into other thoughts again. More than anything, she wants to know if these men know her father. Somehow, she feels, this crew is different from the others. The curiosity to understand them is overwhelming. There are a handful of men in the cages and she decides that she will talk to one. When Kofi inquires whom she wishes him to retrieve, Madi thinks again of the eyes. 

Kofi and Zaki bring him. She wants to know why, when offered full pardons from England his men refused. He speaks, but he is withholding. The look in his eyes and the tension in his jaw bares his feeling of duty to his men. She knows this feeling. She uses it as an entry point into her understanding of this man. It’s dark and he has the upper hand in hiding himself. She pushes him to speak. In measured sentences he talks of his men and hers. He pulls on a doubt that's lingered a long time in Madi's stomach: that her people are hiding while his fight against their injustices in the open. 

How has the dark hidden his mind while expose her own? Aggravating. She does not wish to hide. She wishes to fight. She wants to tell him so if only so that the words ring out and she can be rid of their clawing. But she doesn’t say anything. His motives are unclear. She is not naive.

She looks over his shoulder at Kofi and Zaki, ready to distance herself from the doubt he's cast. She sees him see her. He steps forward, words speeding up as he sees his time coming to a close.

"I have two dozen men in a cage out there of the opinion that she intends to kill us all, sooner than later. And you're going to do  _ nothing _ about it?"  _ Can I do something about it? _

There are few and less who would address her with this kind of familiarity, fewer still that would have her stand in open opposition to her mother. Madi looks at him, meets the force of his eyes. She can feel him call out to her with more than words. His desperation is palpable. The skin on her neck prickles. She nods to Kofi to take him away. The pirate’s gait is choppy. His steps stomp and clatter. One of his feet is a peg made of iron. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? 


	2. Always a Burden

His words pour at her feet as bitter cold as a hull breach. He can't look weak, can't feel weak, can't  _ be _ weak. He's been willing the entire world together by the crush of fingers. He’s lost his leg and somehow lost himself. Who he is now he barely knows and whether that man is worthwhile to anyone he might never know. His job, his crew, his  _ captain  _ are lumbering weights he has no idea how to keep aloft. Who, or what he is, or thinks he might be, shifts like sand under his heel and he's tired. God, he's tired. He yells this at her: perhaps saying half as much, perhaps saying it all. He’s feverish and the air is oven hot. 

He's breathless but she's the one that stops to breathe. "No one prepared you for this, did they?" The words land like blows to his chest, stinging more than the infection around the stump of his thigh.  _ No. _ Noone prepared him for this sudden change in physical ability. Noone prepared him for the frustration of leading men, for the urgency of the men's expectations--for the encumbrance of Flint or his fucking moods. Silver’s life has had no shortage of exhaustion and yet, even rolled into a lump sum, all that experience pales in the face of the bone-deep, soul-deep exhaustion he feels now and--

"Perhaps no one else knows why, I believe that not even you know why, but I know why." 

He feels the rocking world come to a slamming stillness as she speaks. He looks at her and she looks back with a cushioning mercy. He trembles like she's touched him, like he’s moments from shaking apart. His stomach jolts with a sudden deja vu. He thinks about seeing her on the path below the cage and for the second time knows her to have sympathetic ears. Maybe his mouth recognizes this, and this vomit of words was for her all along.

"The crown is always a burden."

The words are obvious now that they chime around him. He's ashamed that he thrust the weight of his insecurities, his physical pain, his exhaustion onto her. He's sure it repels her. And yet, when he looks up from his hands, her face is open. Her head is high like the weight of her crown and now his, weighs little more than feathers. She wants to call for the medicine woman. He refuses. She leaves to fetch the medicine woman. He can't help that he stares after her.




Madi lingers outside Fremah, the medicine woman's, hut. The palm frond roof defuses the noonday sunlight into a patchwork of green and gold. Madi thinks about how the lives of her people and the pirates have become entwined. She tries to leave the thought at this level of abstraction to lessen the bruised feeling in her chest. She is carrying pain that does not belong to her. Yet, when she tries to let it go, her heart fools her into thinking it is her own. 

Fremah’s words are gentle but blunt. If Madi wants her help, she will give it. That Fremah does not like doing so is clearly felt but completely unspoken. Fremah grunts at powders and herbs and Madi fetches them. Fremah points to the opium but Madi shakes her head. She knows he will not take it so there is no need to bring it down. Fremah looks hard at her. There is nothing to say. Both women know that now is the time for doing. Madi takes the opium from the shelf and adds it to the bowl. Fremah takes the bowl of herbs and powders and opium and hands the stone pestle and mortar to Madi. 

The way is short and Madi is gratified that when she and Fremah light the entrance of the hut, Silver’s pant leg is rolled back in preparation for their return. He looks at her then Fremah but says nothing. Shame blackens his face. Only the chirp of insects and the murmur of wind stir the silence as Fremah prepares her salve. Madi watches Fremah directly and Silver from her peripheral vision. Silver looks at Madi as long as she does not look at him, the shame lingering like a fog. 

The crunch of Fremah’s pestle is smoothing into long scrapes. Silver and Madi watch the old woman work. Madi stands quiet to impart an air of peace as she can feel the coil of fear twist of Silver like peels of a bell. Soon the salve is ready. Madi feels her body or Silver’s body bracing. He refuses the opium. Fremah then hands him a biting stick and instead of taking it he turns to Madi, insulted.  _ Take it. _

“If you won’t take the opium, at least take this to bite down on.” She can see that he knew the use of the object before she said it. He refuses, sets his teeth, grips the column of wood supporting the roof. Madi does understand. She  _ does  _ understand. She just wishes he would choose differently...no more so than when Fremah’s hand first pats the dark salve onto his damaged leg. Madi winces with him. The pain is airborne. 

Madi doesn’t know if the process is long or if time has broken, straining seconds into hours. Her body vibrates with the need to end the pain, but her mind schools it again and again into stillness. All she can do is witness these moments. Maybe there is something to be learned, maybe there is something to be tended. Right now it just feels senseless. The sharp cracking sound of Silver’s hand around the column pulls her focus. She wraps her hand around his on instinct. His hand is fire. She wills the pain to end like she wills herself calm. 

The ache of the doctoring looms even after Fremah goes and Silver lays on the pallet, long since unconscious. Madi drags a rocking chair from the corner of the room and sets it closer to the pallet. This will be how it is when the war begins, a voice says in her mind. This will be the pain that comes alongside the mission. This pain feels more specific, however.  _ Just do it, _ he said to Fremah. Madi wonders if she could look so defiantly into the face of pain. She thinks she could, now that she’s seen it done. 

There is something that keeps her in the rocking chair that has nothing to do with the fatigue of the surgery. She feels that she belongs here...for now at least. She rocks slowly back and forth in the chair until a pleasantly thoughtless stupor captures her. She lets her mind follow the breeze to the sea. 




He wakes up in stages, dizzy. The throb of his thigh is the first anchor to reality. The smell of the salve comes back in a noxious plumb, and his teeth set. He swallows hard, nostrils flaring. He must have passed out. He takes a breath. There is something else on the air, he turns his head following the whisper of incense to find Madi, eyes closed rocking on a chair beside his bed. He can’t imagine why she’d stay. He can’t imagine why she helped him in the first place. He swallows hard. 

Her body is soft as it reclines, brow still but lucid. She’s dreaming but not fully asleep. He steals the opportunity to look at her. The sun shines in through the braided fronds of a roof, pleasantly shady. The smell of ceremonial smoke wafting off Madi cuts through the pungence of his leg wrap. A light breeze eases the heat of the day. The quiet is comfortable. If she is disgusted by the weakness he’s confessed to her, or by the decay of his body, she is still here. He feels like a mangy dog. He feels out of place. He watches Madi rock back and forth and back and forth. He hurts less. 

She opens her eyes and they are dark water with none of the associated cold. “Thank you.” _ For staying.  _ They look at each other. His chest is making an annoyingly loud drumming. The quiet is less comfortable now, he thinks. She’s bewitching. Shapely. She’s sharp and looking at him like she can hear him thinking. There’s nothing to hear he insists to himself: He’s not getting any ideas about anything. And that’s absolutely true because her face has a habit of canceling out other thoughts. Her eyes hold a strange challenge as they look at him. The swelter of fever climbs back into his face.

She rocks slowly. “I will pass your thanks to Fremah.” It’s subtle, but there is a smile in her eyes. She shifts as though to stand. He's concerned that she might leave--starts to stand to say something--but she continues to rock. The easy silence drifts back over them. Everything seems less urgent, the seconds begin to slow again until minutes wander by. The warm, still day nudges on a stupor that Silver would lean into if he wasn't so preoccupied with the conversation they'd had before his leg was tended.

"The burden I wasn't prepared for isn't the men. It's him,” he starts apropos nothing. 

"Flint?" she answers as though they’ve been having this conversation all along. Perhaps it’s the pain gone to his head rendering him incapable of sound decision making but he feels she is reading from the same page as he is. Trusting her feels self-evident although he’s not sure exactly what he plans to say.

"What he wants, what he  _ needs... _ what he fears...the depths of it are profound and dark…” 

She’s listening. He tells her of his responsibilities to keep those depths from the crew. And he should stop here, he thinks, but goes on. He lets the fear in his gut unstopper itself and crawl out. He is scared of this closeness with Flint, feels like he’s wandered into it almost accidentally and is stuck. He fears the dark places he’s uncovered--has seen the skeletons of those who’ve wandered in these marshes before. If Flint’s mind is a chasm, he’s already begun to fall in. 

His demons loosed in the air, he looks at Madi. And she is grace personified. 

“Maybe their mistake was in trying to do it alone,” she says. “Maybe to go to such a place one needs another to hold the tether and to find the way out.” 

She does not reprimand his dread nor pity him his admission. She introduces a third option: she offers him a way through. Surely, he thinks, surely she must know it’s too generous an offer. She must see how the light of her words chases away the storm of his horror. He barely manages to answer her, his heart is thumping so hard behind his teeth. 

_ “Maybe,” _ he breathes, but the same instinct that trusts her, tells him that she’s right. Maybe, he thinks, maybe... _ maybe  _ she offers this tether to him in more than goodwill.  _ Could that be possible? _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I straight up port in all the dialogue from this scene? Pretty much, yes. But you know, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.


	3. Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow

Day after day, she somehow has time to watch him sit there as the salve sinks into his leg. Somehow he has the time to just sit. His life has been ‘hurry up’ and ‘wait’ for weeks, all running and rigging and chopping and peeling and sailing. There were days of shouting and stumbling and bailing water as the ship buckled and shuttered in the storm, as the wind pelted icy bullets of rain at his head and shoulders and neck and hands. That was followed by weeks of sitting completely still, mind racing for an escape from the stillness that enveloped them there at the center of the sea. 

He saw men shot to pieces by canons, saw men die sucked into the storm and drown in the frothing waves. Helped Flint starve men. Starved himself for shame of it. Felt that burn in his throat and that tremor in his hands and that flashing in his eyes as his body screamed uncle. He watched men lose their senses and fall to their superstitions. Watched men run to or abandon God. Felt his emotions turn on him, unearthing spirits and memories he’d sooner have left for dead. Felt his tongue grow so dry that seawater looked like it might quench his thirst. 

He knows what it is to rush, to sweat, to stress; it’s rest that feels foreign.

The wind blows lazy through the palms, rustling their leaves so that earth sound and sea sound blur human sound and there is only one innocuous whoosh that might be any of the three. His eyelids feel heavy but he doesn’t let himself sleep. Madi’s rocking in the chair. The creek-creek of the wood weaves into the wind song and he tries to focus. This change of pace is almost suspiciously pleasant. He wonders with what banditry he’s stolen this reprieve. 

The medicine woman leaves as quickly as she came in. The space in the room knits up like a pebble thrown into a pond. There is only a ripple of memory that she was there at all. So here they are again: he and Madi. He rerolls his pant leg so that the irritated skin doesn’t brush against the coarse fabric. He’s watching Madi watch him and makes the belated discovery that he cannot gaze at and avoid eye contact with her simultaneously. She smiles, driving the blood into his face.

"If you have something to say..." she says before he can withdraw. The nerves in his stomach compete with the tug of his mouth. 

"I don't." The lie is transparent and her eyes light with amusement even as her face is calm. She starts to lift her book. "Alright, I may have a few questions. How long have you lived on this island?" he asks. He isn't sure this is the question he wanted to ask first, but he knows that it's this or risking losing himself in moot thoughts of how gentle her touch is. He has to remember himself. Flint tasked him with maintaining her people's alliance while the crew is away, he should take care not to offend her. He remembers Eleanor Guthrie’s immediate dislike of him. 

The stakes are different here. It matters if Madi doesn’t like him. His stomach rolls. It matters...to the goals at hand, he clarifies mentally. That’s not untrue. He tries to think of some use that he could sell himself as having. She seems smart enough, certainly she’s more in control of her moods than certain other leaders he could name. He looks for ways to establish a partnership where he isn’t just a needy invalid. What he wants is her friendship--more, really, if he’s honest though that’s never been a hallmark of his character.  _ Nobody needs an invalid... _

"As long as I can remember."

"You’ve never left?" 

Madi’s mouth flattens into a line. The characteristic self-assurance that rings in every other word and gesture is somehow lost in this one. He shifts so he can look at her. 

"But you want to." She nods.

"I've read about other places. England. France. Spain. Other islands…"  _ The world _ her dark eyes seem to say and he can feel their longing like an ache. He wonders if she would stop him if he reached out to her, returned the comfort she gave when she placed her hand on his days before.

"Where are you from?” she asks, setting the book aside, “Do not say England. Be specific." 

He chuckles and she's smiling again too. The impulse to touch her does not dissipate. If he is supposed to remember himself he has already forgotten. "I'm from London, near Whitechapel." He leans on an elbow, feels the memory begin to suck him in and then readies himself to tell the story about the Home for Boys. It’s a favorite, that story. It has a spellbinding effect on most people and Madi’s attention is something he finds himself striving for. The way she’s watching him now leaves something to be desired. He wants to start in on the jaunty, well traveled tale of youthful shenanigans.

The story isn’t his but he’s told it so many times that it’s become his in every way that matters. He can see the tall slanting boarding house in his mind. Maybe it’s a figment or a place he’s subconsciously seen before. He can smell the mold, the children, and the depravity because none of those smells are unfamiliar. The bittersweet intermingle of memory and loss are not unfamiliar. The characters he conjures have passing semblance to people he’s known. Madi’s brow is knit like she has something to say. Silver stops to let her get a word in.

"Do you remember anything about your parents?" He hasn’t said anything about parents. Has he? He feels unmoored, the story about the stolen bread heel and the mouse he’s queued up seems suddenly inappropriate. For the second time in two days he begins to talk without any foresight as to where his words will lead. "...I...”  _ Yes. “ _ No.” His stomach lurches as a million buried things scrape at the surface of his mind. 

He fakes a laugh, banishing the oily feeling of sick in his stomach. "We can't all be princesses." Madi tips her head. He hopes she accepts this answer without prodding deeper. He more than hopes. He turns the conversation so that she must accept this omission. “When did your father leave for Nassau?”

She shakes her head. Her gaze is intense, scouring, peeling past the fortified layers of him until he can feel more words--his words--chunking together in his mouth. But then she dispels the hypnosis saying, “We came from Nassau. My parents were sold to plantations there until they ended up as property of the Guthries. Then I was born. My father brought my mother and I here during the Spanish raids. I was young.” He can tell this is not what she wanted to say. “My father lived in Nassau for 15 years so we might know a life where we are masters of ourselves.” 

They look at each other for a long moment. Her words are clear, but the meaning rings incomprehensible. On the one hand: Of course. This is a maroon colony of escaped slaves. He knew that. One the other hand: The line between knowing and feeling is thick. She’s just trimmed it a little for him. The weight of her watching him is heavier now, though Madi appears as unbowed as ever. That she should have had to go without anything, not the least a father, feels incomprehensible. He doesn’t know how to feel. 

And he can’t help thinking about fathers. For everything that’s happened, she has a father. He’s met her father. He has no idea what it must mean to have a father, or what it must have meant to have a father so removed that you nonetheless continue to love. And not just a father. A mother too, a village, a place into which you are born and belong. He realizes then how little he wants to talk about family. 

“Whitechapel-” she prompts.

“It doesn’t matter. Everything that happened before is over.” His evasion is surprisingly graceless, but he doesn’t course correct. “We only ever have today and whatever days come after that.”

Madi snorts. “Do you really believe that?” 

“Why is that funny?” 

Madi can think of several reasons, judging by the look on her face. He is serious. She licks her lips, leans back in her chair. 

“From whom or what then, do you draw strength?”

“What?” 

Madi shrugs like she can’t articulate the question with any more clarity. They are at a temporary impasse. Her eyes are hard and he looks at the inflamed meat of his thigh. Not even the wind breaks the silence. 

Madi tries again, “What happened yesterday matters just as much as what you choose to do today... There is no use in pretending that a river chooses its course every morning.” She looks at him hoping he can understand this time. He isn’t listening, doesn’t want to listen, looks away. He pulls a strap of paper from his pocket. 

“Have you already decided the route that your people will take to pick up the guns in Nassau?” he asks, laying the crude map on the table. She shakes her head, no. Seeing the map she stands up to take a closer look. 

“Is this the bay?” she asks, pointing at the ‘c’ curve at the edge of the map. He nods. He takes his finger west and points out a preferred route. Any tension that lingers disappears into the work.




She thinks of her father often. She imagines his fingers pushing in the spines of the books on her shelf. She remembers his smile as he tells her to finish her dinner. She’s so used to thinking of him that she’s not sure what to do now that he is physically here. 

He’s not like she remembers. In her memory his eyes are always bright. This man’s eyes hold a weary depth, they are eyes that have seen much and averted their gaze to more. She remembers a tall man, broad shouldered. She cannot tell how tall the man that lays in the bed before her is. This is her father. She knows that. She just doesn’t know what that means now. 

She strives to love her father but she is not sure which love to use. The love she has for her mother is bright, it is a love fed on years of meals and lessons and jokes and locking her hair. The love for her mother is a hearth light. When she tries to put this love on her father it doesn’t fit. The love she has for her people doesn’t sit right either. It is nurturing and resolute but it feels too...distant. Disrespectful almost.

The unconscious man on the bed--her father--stirs. She cups his hands in hers and finds it hot. Fever. She fetches a cold compress for his forehead. His grip is strong. His body is still vigorous. It’s unlikely that he is often laid out in sickness. She rings the cloth before draping it over his forehead but a rivulet of cool water flows into his hair. He has hair like she does, thick and black. She smiles.

She sits down again and retakes his hand. Perhaps the love most appropriate to him is that of the ancestors. It is his voice that she hears in her mind when she must make a heavy decision, she realizes. This former ghost, her father, is the taproot through which she is connected to this island. He is the nexus from which all other connections flow. Perhaps, too, his compassionate sacrifice is the ideal to which she strives.

He mumbles something, but even when Madi leans in she can't parse it. He’s dreaming. Fast asleep. Over the years she’s thought up a million questions to ask this man.  _ Why did you go back to Nassau? Do you think about me--do you think about mama--like we think about you? Is the island like you dreamt it would be? Did we lead it right?  _ Now here he is. Madi can’t think of a single thing to say. Maybe she’s had enough of sickbeds. Her mind jumps suddenly to Silver in his own sickbed. Has her father ever met Silver? She folds his fingers over her own, not sure if she’s giving strength or taking it. 

It seems the wrong thing to ask.  _ Have you met this man? Silver? Should we follow him and Flint into this war with England?  _ She imagines herself asking and then smirks at her own bashfulness as she thinks about Silver again. Better to ask her father about his health and his plans for this place. She sits with him for another half hour. The silence has a way of bringing her hard questions and what she wants now is peace. 

“Goodnight,” she says kissing her father’s temple. 

\--

“I was thinking about what you said yesterday,” she says arms folded in the doorway. Silver’s eyes followed her long before she came into the openwalled hut. Neither of them acknowledge this fact in words, though she can see in his eyes that they are both aware of it. She won’t begrudge him the looking while she does the same. 

“And what was that?” He leans on the railing a charged glimmer lighting his face.

“We only have today,” she quotes back at him.

He rakes through his beard.“It’s still true.” 

Madi rolls her eyes. 

“Oh? Can you bring yesterday back?” 

Madi frowns. 

“Guarantee the events of tomorrow, then? Today is the only day we can do anything about,” he imps. She rolls her eyes and steps deeper into the room. Somehow she knows that’s what he wanted. He lobs his crutch up under his arm to meet her in the center of the room. 

“Today is what we can touch, but you underplay the importance of both history and vision.” She waits for him to parry, he fiddles with the cloth wrapped around his crutch so she continues. “Men are not conjured up from the sea. If you broke your bowl yesterday, will you be surprised to find it broken today? Will you use the same cracked bowl to hold your soup? Yesterday matters. And sometimes tomorrow is the hope that keeps you going today.” She looks for his eyes. 

“None of that changes the fact that today is the day you need the bowl to eat your soup.”

Madi’s brow furrows. “Today is important but it is not the only day.” He doesn’t see the point in this line of argumentation, she can see that, but something in her needs him to concede. He sighs, takes a harder tact. 

“If you were to walk along the ridge today and fall to your death, what part of your plans for tomorrow matter?” 

The line between Madi’s eyebrows deepens. “All of it-”

“I don’t think you underst-,” he pauses, suddenly thinking the better of completing his thought. 

“You don’t think I understand what?” What  _ he _ doesn’t understand is the responsibility she will inherit as a queen. The crown is a position of legacy. The people’s faith is placed on her because of the foundation laid by her father, the stability of her mother’s rule, and the actions Madi has taken to ensure their future. Madi exists across time. She walks on the feet of her ancestors and feels with the hearts of her people and sees with the eyes of their children. All people exist across time. So she doesn’t understand how Silver exists if not in this way. She wants him to explain it so she can know him. 

“Did you propose the route we chose to your people?” he asks as though they weren’t mid-debate. Madi blinks. 

“Is this how you manage Flint?” She doesn’t mean to say that. Not in that way, anyhow. Silver looks at her and barks a laugh. 

“Uh well…” The stillness between them cracks. He’s embarrassed. She decides to leave it.  _ A chased rabbit will burrow.  _ Silver sucks his tongue and shakes his head. 

She takes the interlude to collect herself. “They’ve been shown the way. My father says it is a good route, minimal traffic from carts and riders.” 

Silver nods. His cheeks look vaguely pink under the bramble of facial hair. “How is Mr. Scott?” he asks. _Feverish,_ she thinks. He doesn’t seem to be getting any better. The bullet hasn’t come out either. It’s likely he has only days left. She feels suddenly like she’s sinking. 

“He’ll get better,” Silver assures before she has to say anything. Madi nods using her breath to push back against the tight feeling in her chest. She wants to believe him. The head of Silver’s crutch knocks against the floor as he takes a step closer. His blue eyes reflect back a look that must be in her face as well. The fingers of his free hand are calloused and warm as they slide into her palm. His thumb smooths over the back of her hand. All thoughts exit with his touch. She curls her fingers around his and knows that she is getting strength.




He's coming to understand that her office on the island is more than ceremonial. There is much and more that she oversees or is responsible for. A child reaches naming age and a small ceremony is held wherein Madi and her mother prepare heaps of food. There are tallies kept of food stuffs, a system of taxation, a hierarchy of elders… He watches her flit in and out of houses, to and from conversations. Yet, even as duties are tended to, they have an abundance of time. 

"Have you read this one then?" He stands next to her as she holds up a green volume entitled  _ Macbeth _ .

"Mmmm, no." 

"This one?" It's a red book.  _ A Discourse of Trade.  _ He’s never heard of it. He hasn’t read  _ The Republic  _ or  _ Voyage Round the World  _ either. 

"How can it be that you've read none of these?" 

"How have you read all of them?" 

They look at each other. Madi's annoyance is for show and he's chuffed that he can tell the difference. 

"I've read that one," he says leaning in and pointing over her shoulder so that, when she turns, their faces are close enough to stopper the breath in his throat. He wonders if he can steal another touch of her skin. 

"The Bible?"

"That’s the one." She looks him up and down, eyes lingering on his mouth. She looks up at his eyes. 

"On my life," he says, voice low, not needing or wanting it to carry. He feels her breath, is acutely aware of his body. "Do you need me to recite a verse?" he smirks. He feels the heat of her eyes on him, can feel their light warming the blood in his neck. Her mouth looks--

"Miss Madi," says a voice from behind them. 

Whatever emotion holds Madi's face fades from it into a cool mask as she turns. Silver turns to see Kofi. The man looks at him, eyes testy for a half second before they bow to the look in Madi's. Silver notices both how dark it has become and how close Kofi is all at once. Neither matter is quite as noticeable as Madi, who stands so very near him.

"Speak," she commands.

"Your mother looks for you." 

Madi nods and squeezes Silver's arm without turning her face from Kofi . The touch pulls every covetous feeling already strung through him into his face. "I am coming," she says and Kofi departs. Only now does Madi step out of their shared space. "Tomorrow?" she asks.

Silver nods, waits to hear Kofi's footfalls vanish. Before Madi can disappear into the dark he takes her hand, making a shuffling step towards her. One hand slides to her elbow feeling the soft, bare skin beneath. Madi stops, looks at him, eyes casting embers. Are her lips as soft as they look? His heart drums and he pretends the headiness he feels is due to his infected leg.

"Tomorrow," he breathes. Her hand stays in his for a heartbeat, solid and warm.

"Tomorrow," she repeats half to him, half to the darkness as she leaves the study. 


	4. Many Faces

It’s the smell of the place that triggers the memory. The smell of smoke and dried fish and sugarcane. Madi’s fingers trail along the peeling paint of the pantry. Her body knows this place. She doesn’t know how many years it’s been since she stood here, but the Guthrie house is uncomfortably familiar. She was born somewhere on this plantation.  _ Funny.  _

For so long she’s wanted to see the world in which her father operates, and now, here she is, in the house that she was born. This is the house of the people that sought to own her. The house of the woman that got to grow up with Madi’s father as Madi grew up fatherless. The house is as empty as Madi feels. And that’s funny too. 

“Ma’am,” says Zaki, and Madi nods for their liaison to enter. The woman is lithe. Eme. Just as her mother described, Eme is hesitant to trust them. Madi recognizes the woman’s face, even if she’s never seen her. Eme has the hard eyes of so many women that have paddled their way to the island, eyes that have seen indescribable things. The set of her jaw is defiant. 

“Your name is Eme, you knew my father,” says Madi, taking a step toward her. “My name is Madi.” Eme nods, understanding at once. The world makes a strange sense after that. Madi, Zaki, and Kofi wait in the old Guthrie house as a network of slaves and freed people of color gather the scattered caches of shot, powder, guns and a single portable canon. It takes an hour, maybe less. It’s less weaponry than Madi hoped, maybe 7 crates total. There is no moon and the night is still and dark. Their feet and hands work with the practiced synchronization of hard labor. The cache is loaded onto a cart and Zaki leads it back to the  _ Walrus _ . 

Eme leaves after Zaki and then Madi and Kofi take a separate path back into Nassau proper. Madi stands, arms folded, back tucked into a corner of the tavern behind Kofi. She could wait the rest of the night out on the ship, but she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t curious to see how the other half of their plan unfolds. She wants to see if words alone are enough to recapture the will of this town of pirates. She wants to see Silver at work.

Mr. Silver swaggers in and immediately holds the attention of everyone in the place. His words are cold and sure: the men here have benefited from the spoils of gold captured by Flint’s coalition. The men here swore to protect Nassau, and yet here they sit their words broken, an English governor back in power. He baits the men with no trace of the sly smiles or vulnerability she’d seen on her island. He’s a plant reintroduced to its native soil: tall, robust. The pride and power shines off him like a halo.  _ Attractive. _

He retrieves the ledger of men who months prior swore their allegiance to the pirate cause, when a bespectacled man rises from his seat. The dinner crowd’s attention shifts, Madi’s attention shifts to this man too. She wonders how Mr. Silver will tolerate this question of his authority. The bespectacled man begins well enough, pointing out the inherent weakness in relying on an uncoordinated mass of men’s allegiance or fear of Flint. She can’t imagine it is an argument that Silver hasn’t thought to rebuttal. She leans against the wall. 

“ _ Half a man,”  _ the bespectacled one says. She feels Kofi’s arm stretched before her like a blockade. She looks at Kofi and steps back as the bespectacled man thuds to the floor. Kofi and Madi turn. Even in the lowlight the pewter mug in Silver’s hand glints a red-brown smear. She finds Silver’s face but doesn’t recognize it. She can’t bring herself to look down as Silver’s foot steps  _ into  _ the man’s face. The sound of the iron leg clangs through the noiseless tavern. 

The sounds that follow are awful. The sights that follow are awful. She forces herself to watch, to observe, to  _ see  _ this man she’s allied with. She needs to know him for his actions as well as his words. She struggles to connect the two. Silver yanks the book from the table and trots out followed by the other men in his party. Is this the darkness that he spoke of, Flint’s darkness? For a moment Madi is too stunned to move. Someone begins to scream and Kofi drags Madi out of the tavern and into the street at a fast clip. 

“What happened?” she asks, catching Silver enroute. His face is splattered in blood and the stink of viscera sweats from him. When he spoke to her before, he’d led her to believe that the viciousness he feared in Flint had only grazed him. He’s in deep. 

“I’m fine,” he says unbothered by remorse. Pleased even. A chill rolls down her spine.

Is she wrong for placing her trust in him and his partners? Her father’s words remind her to remember the villain she and the pirates hold in common. She’s bothered that when she tries to heed the reminder her mind grasps at the image of Silver, blood sprayed from his boot to his face. She’s bothered that even seeing this there is a part of her that wants to continue to trust him, wants the lasting freedom promised by a victory in this war. She’s bothered at how personally she takes his change of attitude. 

Black water washes against the hull of the  _ Walrus _ as she idles on the upper deck. There is nowhere aboard the ship that she can find solace from the tellings and retellings of this night. The story is on the lips of every man. The air rings with whispers. The steady taste of bile coats her tongue. She doesn’t know where Silver is or what she would say to him if she did. Flint goes to find him. She starts to wonder what the captain will say but all she can concentrate on is the way Silver’s eyes had switched from blue to black in the intermittent torch light of the street. Eyes like a half-spotted predator in an unlit bush: hungry, cruel. 

In her hammock she thinks of all the faces of Silver she’s seen. What is his true shape? Does _ he  _ know it? Her mind conjures another face he’s made in the dark. This time his eyes are a blue made warm by the candles in her study.  _ Tomorrow _ he promises. His touch is tender. She turns to face the wall. He has not been trained to withstand the strain of leadership. He said this. Perhaps he is formless, water that can be tipped into a container of any shape. Flint is tipping him into an urn...

She ignores the voice that tells her to leave Silver to his devices and secure her own safety. It sounds too much like her mother. It sounds too much like hiding. Madi’s strong. She wants to take the world in her two hands and mold it into a place where she can thrive. Silver’s asked for her help, hasn’t he? Let her help lead him from this rage, wouldn’t the alliance benefit from that? 


	5. Doing the Hard thing

He’s ready to be annoyed at the un-knocking visitor that enters the quarters, but as he looks up and sees Madi his annoyance is nowhere to be found. Apparently she is just as interested in learning to sail as he is. Although he holds the crew's attention whenever he climbs onto the deck, having  _ her _ attention is different. Relaxing perhaps, as he isn’t burdened by airs. In answering her questions about the ship’s position he feels the knowledge imparted on him by Mr. Degroot beginning to cement itself. He wants to keep going, keep talking, keep joking. 

Like an unexpected wind, she slips in to change the tenor of the conversation. “You expressed your concern to me that to truly partner with your captain, you would need to join him down a dark path.” Some part of him knew that she’d been there that night. He’d hoped she took to the story with the same fervor the crew had, but sees now that this was folly. He chews the inside of his lip, keeps his eyes from her, pretends to focus on the map at his hands. He feels smaller somehow. He’s hoping she’ll drop it. “And that you feared that it might lead you to a place that you would not be able to return from,” she continues. 

He screws his eyes up at her. The implication of what she says...this is the second time she’s offered to fish him out of this hole. He’s thought back on that conversation more than a few times, thought back on that day in her study. He forces himself to conclude that her concern is no more than what would she offer to any of her people. But now…

“You’re concerned about me.” And she  _ is _ . He sees it. The smile that dances over his face shows that he hears it under the surface talk about alliances and crews, beneath her understated admission. He feels energized. Maybe he can keep her here with him, talking, joking. He moves closer. 

“My mind is clear,” he assures her. She’s unconvinced, wearing a hard look though softer than the one she’s worn for the last few days. He starts to say something more when someone knocks. He allows his eyes to linger on her a moment longer before he turns. 

The optimism he felt a moment ago--so close to Madi again--so sure he could win her, drains from him now as he turns between Dooley, Dobbs, and the bloodied member of Madi’s crew.  _ Fuck.  _ He reels through a hundred options. Mr. Dooley verbalizes the solution Silver’s fury longs for: kill Dobbs, throw him overboard. Blood for blood. Simple. Every part of him knows it will not be enough.

Sucking on his teeth he sees that the best option is to test the bounds of Madi’s forgiveness. He has not yet faltered in speaking plainly to her and he hopes this will not be the time he is proven wrong. As soon as she is led in her confusion turns to recognition. A growing part of him wishes to punch Dobbs in his face before throwing him overboard and then falling on his knees to beg her forgiveness for this wanton stupidity. Instead his mouth delivers the speech he readied. 

How will she react? He doesn’t know. He knows how he would react. He remembers walking into the brothel in Nassau looking for Logan. He found him face down on the floor soaked in his own blood. Now he’s in Max’s shoes asking Madi to stay calm. He hadn’t stayed calm, not at first, and they didn’t have the luxury of Madi raising her voice here.  _ God please let her handle this better than I did...  _

She does not look at him once. She’s blind to everything but the bloodied black man who sits silently on the floor. Her silence is unnerving. Will she turn around and call Flint in to break the alliance? _ Fuck. Fuck. _ **_Fuck_ ** _.  _ If he could be anyone else--anyone stronger, better-- he would be. 




The way he stands, angling his body between her and whatever lies in the corner of the hold, alerts her to the danger. The clipped tone of his voice cautions her that it’s not something she will want to see. Her eyes dial in on it, on him. Chidi stares forward at nothing, eyes swelling shut, blood bright and fresh on his hands, his face, his shirt. The stink of it cuts through the smells of goat and sweat and salt and man. The taste of bile returns to her mouth to see that he is bound. 

There is no fight in Chidi. Not anymore. “This is the man responsible. The  **only** man. He’ll be punished,” Silver says. She’s only half listening. The words don’t matter. She knows that maintaining the alliance must be held above all else. She sees now that that means above Chidi’s safety, her safety. Certainly above her feelings. It disgusts her, but that night at the tavern so rid her of her shock that she has none left for this moment. She reaches out to touch Chidi’s face and he flinches from her touch.

The part of her that is beholden to no one wants to scream, to fight. But Madi belongs to her people. “May I have a knife, please?” It is Silver who hands her his--pummel first--his hands still tight on the hilt. She turns to look him in the face. If anyone in this moment is allowed to question trust it is she, but she chokes the impulse to say so. Silver is pleading wordlessly with her. What does he think she will do here? She tightens her grip on the dagger until he releases it. She cuts Chidi loose. 

“Wait a minute,” says Silver, halting Chidi’s exit. Then lower, just to Madi he adds, “Until I know what he’s going to say, I can’t let anyone walk out of here.” She feels exhausted by him, by all of them. That they have laws, or hierarchy, or any semblance of respect or order on this ship seems a fiction.

“He isn’t going to say anything.”

“He has to say something.”

“He’s going to say that he spoke impertinently to me, Kofi took offense, and it will not be spoken of again.” She can tell that Silver does not believe her. 




“Just like that?” 

“Yes. Now let him go.” He stares hard at her. His body commits to trusting her before his mind does and then Chidi walks from the hull. It feels like the wrong decision, relying on someone, anyone,  _ Madi _ , to fix this. 

“If he says a word…” then this thing they are trying to build will dissolve like paste in water, he doesn’t say. He wants to chase after Chidi, to feed him a story, any story. He wants to drown Dobbs. He needs Madi to prove she’s fixed this thing. 

“When I speak--my men listen, and they do as  _ I  _ say.” He receives his knife back still unsure of what the next few hours will bring. 

By some miracle the day is quiet. It goes against all judgement and all experience, but, in the same way that Flint can will a thing into being, Madi can too. The crew, both crews, accept Chidi’s silence. Finding her on the quarter deck, he endeavors to say thank you. He is not prepared for the tongue lashing that follows, but he takes it knowing he’s getting off easy. She is not angry, she is indignant. When she speaks he knows it is the actions of today as well as that day at the tavern--the actions of Dobbs and himself--that she is referring. 

“I will serve them by minding their future, and doing the hard thing that will lead to the outcome desired by all of us,” she says.

He’s back below decks looking at the map again. Thinking. Wondering whose lessons he will be faster in learning: Degroot’s or Madi’s. He pushes a protractor over the page to no real end. Above him he can hear Flint barking orders. He leans against the table. Madi’s words reoccur to him--not about doing the hard thing, not about the retribution she quelled within herself at seeing Chidi--but that she’s concerned for him. 

He drills the pointed end of the protractor into the side of the table. “ _ So yes, I am concerned.”  _ Is that true? The thing in his chest wants to believe it, the thing in his head lists off a million reasons that she cannot have meant it. Still...she saved his ass today. That had to count for something. He pictures the options that Madi had to choose from to answer Dobb’s offence. It’s only Flint’s answers he sees. Maybe his own answers too. He turns the question in his mind trying to see it from every angle but cannot find a window into her choices other than the one she made. Not yet… 


	6. Stories

He’s starting to realize that he cannot hope to hide behind postures and have her as well. Because whatever she is it is solid. Real. He gets the distinct feeling that she can tell he is a worthless glass bauble. What people think of him has never mattered, outside of getting what he wants. What  _ she _ thinks though... He whittles the potato in his hands into a nub.




They sit side by side in Madi’s study. 

“We spoke that day...before he died.” She wishes her voice would flow without cracking, but the wound is still too fresh. Madi looks at the ceilings and wills her eyes to dry. She‘d only had her father back for a short time. The words he said to her were so evocative, so counter to everything she’d believed about him for so long. It’s all too much.

Silver leans against the study desk. His eyes follow her as she takes two steps stops...takes another step...motions with her hands...stops. His brows angle in, waiting without rushing. He plays with words in his head but none seem right. Madi's pacing now.

"What did he say?" he asks at last, and the question is a mercy. She stops, toe to toe with him.

"I always assumed that his love was split between two places, two daughters."

"Eleanor?" 

Madi nods, hugs her elbows. "But I was wrong." Her voice is high, hurt. “When I was young I felt that Eleanor stole him. It seems childish to be bitter about it still but...” She gives a little shake of her head. “He told me that I was wrong...that he only had one daughter.” Even saying the words is difficult. They press on Madi’s chest with the weight of fifteen years.

There are few times that Silver has nothing to say, but they all seem to happen when he’s around Madi. “He loved you,” Silver says. There’s an ache in the words that even Madi can hear. She nods. 

“Will you go with me to present my offering?” She doesn’t know why she asks him, but it feels right. Her father was a man she loved but never knew. Grieving him feels raw and awkward. She cannot go to her mother whose grief is so specific. Silver probably knew her father about as much as she did. She doesn’t want to face the death of this part of her life alone. 

“I don’t know if I should… is it--”

“I am inviting you.”  _ Please. _

“I’ll find something to offer,” he says. Madi musters a smile and he echos it.




He’s squinting into the noon day light that reflects off the shore as he recounts. 

"So you stole the gold out from underneath them and you still sail on the ship with them?" Her eyebrows arch. 

"One: they don’t know...other than Flint,” they exchange a look, “and two: I didn't keep any of it."

"You didn't keep  _ any _ of it? After all of that?" Her left eyebrow is climbing higher on her forehead. He laughs. She leans closer to him and he moves his arm to welcome her. He does not expect her hand on his chin or the diagnostic look she gives. Now it is his eyebrows that flex. Her eyes give the uncomfortable impression that she is reading him and might flip and scour the pages upon which any and all of his secrets lie. "Are you trying to seduce me?" 

"Haven’t I already," she quips, thumbing his cheek before releasing his chin. He chuckles. He follows her gaze over the water.

"I don't understand you," she says, though Silver can't help but think she's wrong. “You spend all that time pursuing one goal only to shift to a new one when the first is in reach?” 

His look flickers from her to the ocean before he sighs. “I couldn’t get by anymore. Not alone.” She doesn’t say anything. They watch the tide come in. He feels her fingers on his, a slow, grazing touch. They pointedly avoid looking at one another. 

“The more time you spend with them the more you realize you care,” she states. He doesn’t need to acknowledge that she’s right. Looking into her face he wonders if she’s ever been alone, ever felt the desperation of self-sufficiency or the carelessness of having only yourself to care about. She is strong but her observable tendencies lean toward compassion. 

He’s heard his share of sermons as a ward of the state, sat on cold pews and watched his breath waft higher and higher until it disappeared into the peaking ceiling. Madi’s fingers in his feels to like closest he’s come to grace. She’s warm, something to believe in. “So that’s the story,” he says. 

“Mmm.” 

“What?”

“So you told Flint that you stole from him and he didn’t throw you to the sharks?” Her eyes sparkle with the joke. 

“Ah, you may have noticed, I’m  _ very  _ likeable,” he protests in mock offense. Madi roars a laugh. 

He grins. “I imagine I would have made decent shark bait. He’s had the opportunity actually. Did I tell you that one?” Madi shakes her head and he’s all too happy to recount the tale for her. 


	7. The First of Many

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Content warning: sex.)

She sucks the dryness off her bottom lip, eyes diverted by Silver mirroring this action. He’s leaning toward her, blue eyes locked on her mouth. He’s watching her so intently that it takes him a moment to notice she’s seen him. Silver blinks rapidly, grinning at the floor. 

“I’m staring,” he admits like a bashful schoolboy. 

Madi smirks. It’s a failed effort to try to focus on the book in her lap when her palms are this hot. She wonders how much of the story he’s actually heard, even though reading aloud was his idea. She laughs to herself, knowing that it was a casual excuse to carve out an hour of shared respite. She knew before she agreed, but she’s realizing that now. She’s sitting next to him on the bed instead of in the rocking chair.

“It’s because I find you beautiful,” he says.  _ What a statement,  _ she thinks, but the look in his eyes is so genuine. His hooded eyes look black in the light. His heat tickles her face, he is so close. His hand slides over hers. Before she can think better of it she leans in. He breathes, free hand cradling her jaw. He touches her with none of the confidence of his words. Their foreheads touch feather soft before he pulls away. 

It feels like there’s no air in the room. They are suspended on the edge of a precipice afraid to move. Madi’s heart knocks against her teeth as his thumb smooths over her cheek. There’s a question in his eyes. “Madi-” 

She catches the name with her lips feeling the electricity of his half open mouth as it ricochets into her spine. He makes a soft noise. His head tilts to recapture her lips. His touch turns from moth wings to steel. His hand finds purchase in her hair, angling her to fit against his mouth. He kisses her like a drowning man clawing for air. Desperate. Needy. The first time their lips come apart they both gasp. Silver’s whiskers graze the line of her chin, running up toward her ear and Madi is trembling. “I want all of you,” he husks. 

“I know.” 

Her hands press into his chest, feeling him hot and thrumming and alive, before she trails them onto either side of his neck. She wants all of him, too. It’s like Silver has ten hands. Hands cup her neck, slide over her thigh. Hands run down the curve of her spine. Hands clench the meat of her hip. Silver pulls her up onto his lap and Madi’s skirt hitches and rips as she attempts to straddle him. Panting, they look down at the skirt and then at one another. 

“Doesn’t matter,” she says before he can say anything. Silver pauses and then he is pulling her down into a deep, open mouthed kiss. The feel of his tongue on her teeth makes her brain sputter out. She feels her balance being pushed backward as they turn. 

“We can salvage it,” he mumbles half to himself looking at the ribbon of skin visible through the ripped side seam of the skirt. And now Madi is on her back and Silver is yanking his striped shirt over his head. The fingers of his left hand push the locks from her face as he kisses her again and again. The fingers of his right hand have burgled their way under layers of blouse and skirt to skin. Madi gasps at the stove-hot touch, pelvis bucking. Now both hands loose the buttons of her skirt and in a surprisingly graceful maneuver Silver shimmies to standing and Madi’s skirt is off. Madi throws her blouse aside, shivering for his skin. 

“Let me,” she says of his pants. He holds onto the bed post as Madi crawls to the edge of the bed. She sees that he is hard even before she’s unlaced his pants. She moves at an unbothered speed, fingers tickling up against his flesh as she undoes the knot. Every graze and brush causes him to ‘ah,’ until she can’t help but peel away the waist of fabric and lick a stripe down his hip. He buckles in half over her, gasping at the unexpected sensation. His free hand comes down like a vice on her shoulder. Madi tugs away his pants, hands riding his thighs as he growls something sacrilegious and indecipherable.

Madi’s fingers tease at the already sticky head of his cock. Her leg loops stupidly around his and he loses his balance. They crash land in a naked pile on the hard mattress.  _ “Shit.  _ Are you alright?” he asks, rising to his hands and knee. All the commotion has knocked his hair tie loose and his black shag wreathes his face. His smile is as horny as it is embarrassed. After weeks of saving face and leading with their crowns, she feels like she’s seeing him for the first time. There is no pirate king here. Looking up at him he is someone wholly new. She wonders how he can get lost in the dark with a smile so full of sun.

“Just appreciating the view,” she laughs. Something flashes over his face like a firework and he laughs so hard that she’s swept into his mirth. They roll into a more comfortable position, side by side on the blanket. Silver moves her hands back onto him and then cups her face to kiss her again. She could kiss him until her lips are numb and he seems determined to try. 




It’s the simplest plans that work. He’s laying on a rock watching the stars pop into existence one at a time when it comes to him. For days he’s conspired elaborate schemes to put himself next to Madi in the right place at the right time, and every time he’s lost the moment. The first time--the time he’d come closest, he’d walked her out to see the ship. It was a long walk over uneven terrain under the evil eye of the summer sun, and Madi said as much, but he insisted he was up for it. Weighing the potential outcome, he  _ was _ up to it. 

What he wasn’t up to was Tyson and Dobbs spotting them as soon as they’d made it to the beach and then conscripting him to all matter of conflict resolution about fucking rigging. And it wasn’t like he could say no, not when it was Madi’s countrymen with which they took issue. Every other time amounted to just about the same. He’d set up a row of meticulously placed dominos just to watch some idiot topple half as he was going in for the piece de resistance. 

Then he’d be back in that room at the end of the week, waiting for a new pot of salve for his leg, and he’d sit there pretending that he was perfectly alright with Madi getting this view of him. And it’s this thought that comes to him under the moonlight. He and Madi sit together in that room together, uninterrupted, at least once a week. The solution is obvious if he can get over himself. It’s wholly unfair that he should have to bare himself at a time when he is already most vulnerable. But then when has life handed him a fair hand?

Really, it’s the most excited he’s ever been for the prospect of stingy ointment to be lathered over his tender stump. He laughs angrily, resolved that tomorrow is the day. 

\--

His leg is fine. He’s fine. But as Madi starts to sit up he winces. She stops, worry painting her features. “Do you think you could read me something for a few minutes?” he asks, mustering every ounce of puppy sweetness, leaning hard into his role as an invalid. She nods. 

“What would you like to hear?” Anything. He doesn’t care. He hasn’t suffered through the scriptures in decades but he’d settle for a few verses now. 

“Whatever you’ve been reading is fine.” Madi smiles to herself and disappears from the room to go fetch the book. He can’t believe how smoothly this plan is going. He has just enough time to straighten up the blankets before she comes back carrying a brown-red tome. He’s sitting, legs dangled over the edge of the bed and motions for her to join him. 

“ _ Voyage Round the World _ ,” she says of the book. 

“Woodes Rogers?” he asks, reading the author’s name on the spine. “The new governor?”

“Yes.” She’s half finished it already. He swears she was reading something else two days ago. He watches her fingers press the sheets apart along the string bookmark, follows the line of her arm up to her shoulders to her pretty neck and face. He swallows. He doesn’t hear a word passed the first one. The sound of her voice makes every tale of mermaids true. He can’t focus for the way her mouth tastes every line. 

\--

They fall into a heap. Madi’s skin is hot to the touch and crushed underneath him. The unexpected contact between his dick and her chest temporarily shunts his soul from his body. He swallows the gurgle of sound coming up from his chest. He heaves himself off her, hoping to God that she wasn’t hurt in the graceless backward tumble. The spike of self hate that flashes through him for his lack of balance is drowned by the rapture of Madi beneath him.  _ God her skin…  _

There’s so much of her he wants to touch. He feels less like he’s missing a leg than he’s missing a pair of hands. Her eyes are carnal. Every part of him is awake and at attention. 

He wastes no time in kissing her. The feel of her lips and the nectar of her mouth brings him dangerously close. His hand wanders down her burning body thumb finding the soft nest of hair beneath her pelvis. His fingers begin to tease at her lips when he feels the heavy clink of metal on metal as his rings clack.  _ Jesus fuck.  _ That he has to forgo the plump breast in his right hand to remove the fucking things is a crime. 

Madi buckles as his fingers leave her skin, moaning at pitch that threatens to finish him. “Give me, one minute,” he chokes. Madi’s hands loose his hair and his ass and he has to breathe to keep his balance. He presses up off of her and rolls to the edge of the bed. Mercifully there’s a pail of fresh water near them on the floor. Originally meant to wash off the salve, it’ll do for this. Silver reaches his hands into the pail, washing the day off and getting the rings loose enough to pry off. He rolls them into the end of his sleeve tossed by the pail. 

Madi’s on her back reaching for him as he crawls back and it’s like no time has passed. She draws his fingers into her mouth caressing them with her divine tongue. The sound he makes cannot be suppressed, nor can the gush of precum. His thumb brushes her clitoris, fingers playing at her lips and finding her sopping. He dances one finger in. Madi’s head falls back and the way she says his name makes it impossible to stop.

Her hand is on his cock and his vision whites out. His hands pull her hips into place and she leads him in. The first thrust threatens to be the last. Her body shutters like a sheet in the wind. He’s gasping trying to quiet his mouth with succulent bites of her. There is no rhythm to the way he thrusts in and out of her wet grasp. He doesn’t know his name from hers. He doesn’t know anything. 

Everything is fire and electricity. He holds her too tight, pulling her to him until there is no more space to close. Her chest vibrates against his. She purrs and moans and gasps his name, fingers like claws down his back. He’s almost afraid he’s hurting her for the noises she makes but if he tries to slow or pull away she holds him steady. The world frays at the edges, their fire burning it outside in. When at last he erupts, he’s shaking so hard that he can’t hold himself up. She pulls his weight down to her gladly whispering something in a language he doesn’t know. They fall asleep sticky and wrung out. 


	8. Solace and Dreams

She rolls awake as he jerks in his sleep. He’s swimming through agitated dreams. The conversation they had earlier in the day rings in her ears. It was a variation on a topic she's become well versed in. Flint: Red man with splintering green eyes. By some accounts he’s a demon. From Madi’s vantage, he’s a man possessed. She twines one of Silver’s curls around her finger. He told her, weeks ago, that there were once others allowed into the inner workings of Flint's mind. Only their spirits wander the earth now. 

Silver spoke in specifics tonight. Tales of the dead: Gates, Mrs. Barlow. Madi sees them in her mind like she’s read their stories. Gates is round with soft eyes; a hard wrapper around an inner soft. Her mother is that way too. Only people on the outside perceive the wolf. She imagines her mother dealing with Flint… She imagines Mrs. Barlow, shape unset besides her smile. She is a woman that melts the ice daggers before they can pierce her. That’s like Constance, maybe. Maybe like her father too. 

She sees Silver telling their stories, gazing outward like he does when he recounts the details of his captain’s life. His eyes glaze like he's tracing the edges of the darkness he's touched, and trying to remember its shape. Madi doesn’t have to imagine the dark. She’s looked into Flint’s eyes. Flint’s is a story of loss. Silver’s stories of him quilt together into a patchwork, not unlike many of the people that live on her island. Stories of lost homes. Stories of lost lovers. Stories of goliath wheels crushing David after David. A patchwork of pain. Silver hefts Flint’s story like Madi carries the stories of her people.

She turns toward Silver as he sleeps. Shadows of wispy moonlight hang in the creases of his face and she knows without knowing that he is back there in the darkness. She imagines him as a solo diver swimming so deep that the water becomes black and all directions become down. She watches his eyes, lidded but flitting. She wishes he wouldn’t go where it is hard to follow. 

She will not renege her promise to him. The wave of dark hair at his temple clings to her finger as she pushes it from his slick forehead. She wades into the dark.

"It's alright," she whispers, rubbing his arm. "You're alright." When, after a moment, he seems to relax, she closes her eyes imagining meeting his spirit in the hazy ink of sleep. In the moments before sleep claims her, when she exists in and out of herself, she imagines the weight of a lantern in her hand and feels his arm pull her closer, feels his nose against her breast bone. He mumbles something and Madi follows the sound into her dreams. 




Barefoot next to Madi, he sinks his foot into sand feeling it slither around his ankle until he is rooted in place. The cool underlayer of damp sand keeps the sun from his skin. He leans into Madi and exhales as her warm arms circle him. He doesn’t say anything, and for a moment he doesn’t think anything either. 

The sun wanders from the sky into the water, bathing the shore in soft light. Madi's breath, too, is soft. Madi nudges him up and they wander back to find her bed. Everything comes off and most of the sand too. He’s in a warm haze. Madi pulls him against her, kisses him sweetly. His eyelids are heavy and he wonders whether he’ll open them again. It is a feeling like floating. The world falls away. 

And dreams are odd things. They spin together the impossible with the lived. He imagines his mind like a spiderweb. Breathing the smell of Madi's skin, levitating out of his sleeping body, he is sent across the web. Dream inertia pulls him from the refuge of her arms to a place where he is smaller and shaking with cold. He can't feel his fingers. He's been shuffling around on dead feet for what feels like days. It's an embankment that takes him, knocks his footing right out from under him. The snow's embrace is so cold that it becomes hot. Silver hugs into it. The wet is sousing his tattered clothes but he doesn't feel it anymore. He doesn't feel anything. He's floating. 

He wakes up willing the dream away even as he knows it is these dreams that stick. There are heavy things that weigh his chest like a necklace--the pain of thirst or the acrid brine of raw eel; a stack of deaths both violent and untimely; the things the sea stole, that Flint stole, that he stole… His heart beats fast and he’s sucking for air. Madi lays sleeping beside him as he tries to place reality. 

He inches closer, rolling onto his side to meet her shape. They fit together like game pieces. Even if he is broken. He swallows. Madi's skin is smooth and shining and warm beneath the thin blanket. He lifts the edge of the woven sheet so that his nose can trace the blade of her shoulder. He is lost in the smell of her as his nose traces from back to neck to hair.

The rim of her ear is just there. If he rubs along it, it will tickle and she'll smile and wriggle. He'll have no choice but to hold her there in his arms, tighter and tighter as her laughter becomes breathless. No choice but to kiss her and suck her and taste her until she is dizzy with pleasure and says his name in that rasping, exhilarating way. He smiles into the nape of her neck.  _ When she wakes up. _

She shifts and he's apologetic to think he's woken her...but no, she's still sleeping. A strange urgency envelopes him, then, to protect her. To mind her. His arm drapes along the top of her stomach. His breath settles to her rhythm. The urgency lingers and blends with a cottony soft comfort. The heaviness on his chest melts off taking with it the sharp things in his mind. He is safe here with her. He snuggles closer.

\--

He watches her as she bundles the bedding in her arms and is struck by the idea of children. Of a life with her away from this island, away from Nassau, away from war. His mind draws a pretty picture of Madi sitting in her rocking chair with a child gathered in her arms. The world is candlelit in his imagination. He draws near the cooing bundle in Madi’s arms and it reaches for him. A boy. The babe’s grip is strong, it’s little hand painted a golden hue by the sleepy hearth flame. The dream baby’s eyes are Madi’s eyes, big and brown and intelligent.

He wants everything with Madi,  _ for _ Madi. He wants to give her a life she can be proud of. He watches her as she tidies the room in preparation for the day. They haven’t left for Nassau but he already misses this time with her. He picks up the red beaded necklace and she lets him lay it over her shoulders. This is the last time, for a while that he'll be able to touch her like this. He bows his head into hers and she straightens out his beard. 

"You need to trim it," she says, "I can do it for you if you like." He nods, so reluctant to pull away.

Flint is talking about guns and ships and war. Silver is watching the toddle of a plump baby escorted across a village street by two other children. There are so many children here. Not like Nassau. Not like any ship. There are lives here, futures. He wants this. He nods, half listening. 

He looks for his child. He looks for a vision of what a child with Madi's eyes and his smile might be. The child,  _ the children _ , already live within him alongside the dream of his future with Madi. They are wild haired, smart little things that will crowd around his knees... a testament to their parent's love. He leans into his hand and grins.

"Resupply schedule not interesting enough for you," Flint snipes. Silver turns his gaze back into the room.

"I'm listening," he lies.

"If you're distracted go for a walk." The captain scratches his fuzz of hair, pointing peevish at the door when Silver looks at him. Silver frowns, not understanding how the captain's mood could be so dark in a place as bright as this. He can hear Flint jostling around ledgers and maps and paper goods as he crutches out into the sunlight. 




She wriggles underneath him, frustrated but not really trying to get away. He laughs.

She aches to be made whole. She bucks her hip against him trying to throw his balance so that he tips and she can be on top. Months of hauling rope and balancing aboard a rocking ship have made him strong. Stronger than that man she’d met sunbeaten, feverish, and starved. She grins at him. If she cannot get out from under him, then she will melt him into her. 

With every layer of sweat she burns from him, every kiss and touch and shiver she coaxes, he is clearer to her, until one day she knows for sure that she is in love with two men. One man--the quartermaster--is stoic and brave, cares deeply for his people. He stands tall in her mind. Confident. A pirate king if ever a pirate king there was. Perhaps a king fit for the princess of this island... 

The other---the cook--is a shadowy creature, smaller, lanker, able to appear and disappear at will. His smile, when caught, is big and charming. He only says the right things, knows how and when to draw a laugh. His motives are significantly less clear, and yet there such genuine adoration in his eyes that it is hard to stay away. The more she tastes of Silver, the more she sees that one of these men is an illusion. She tries to peel the identities apart but it isn't until she hears the imposter named that she knows for certain that he is the fake. 

“Who is Long John Silver?” she asks, laying against him. She's heard the stories, but she wants to hear his version. Wants to hear from the man himself which Silver is real. 

“That’s a very good question. I assume Billy saw value in the tall tales told about me after that night in the tavern. Saw mystery in it perhaps. Used my name to tell his story.” Silver shakes his head, no doubt thinking on the character he is to assume upon their return to Nassau. This ‘Long John’ bothers him. And yet...hasn’t he been playing some variation of this character since they met? 

“Why does this bother you?” She should have guessed the answer would be Flint. Silver explains that he and the captain are most powerful when unified. 

“To elevate one of use over the other, even as a fiction, seems to me to be tempting fate in a most dangerous way. And...” 

“And it upsets you because you believe he is your friend." A guess, though not uninformed. Silver is more connected to Flint than he admits, or maybe they are more connected than he realizes. Madi thinks about the red haired captain, green eyes watching Silver like a hawk. Possessive. Guarding. She thinks too about how often Silver’s thoughts go to Flint. She wonders how much of the quartermaster, Long John Silver, is affected with thoughts to Flint. 

She is starting to understand the shape of Silver and Flint’s connection. Silver has invited her inside himself and with those keys she has access to rooms that perhaps even he avoids. What waits beyond the door where he keeps Flint she assumes is a loyalty both tentative and hard won. Yet the concern in his eyes as he speaks of the man hints at something more.

Silver turns to Madi, breathes the musk of her hair, runs his calloused fingertips down the supple flesh of her arm, distracts her. She returns to him and their bed, letting his heat draw her to him. Whatever mask, or darkness, or unspoken feeling he holds within him, she knows she would somehow weather it. 

“I think you would be a very good king. If I were a no good pirate, I would follow you wherever you led.”  _ If you are just a man, I love you no matter your demons.  _


	9. Where are you?

She keeps replaying the scene in her mind. Sees his hand in her hand. Feels Zaki tugging on her to go. Hears Silver yell at her to go. There must have been a boom, the great crack of the mizzen as wood splintered into schrap by the cannonball. In the endless loop of memory it is silent. She just hears Silver yell for her to go before he is launched in a tangle of net into the water.

She should not have let them move her. She should not have let them insist that she go first. She should have thrown herself into the water to find him before she let them row her away. But this insistence on changing things already passed is senseless, especially when there is still so much to do. Still she stands frozen on the Nassau shoreline watching the lifeboats come in slowly, slowly, one-by-one. 

The men in the rowboat are silhouettes under the scouring sun. She hopes and hopes until their faces at last come into view and boat after boat he’s not among them. This is the last lifeboat. The last one. The men from the previous lifeboat say there’s a man upon it that just escaped drowning. She can’t guard her spirit from the welling hope that keeps her eyes on the horizon and that last boat.

Flint steps slow and careful onto the sand beside her where he stands in silence. He’s barely here. It is just her and the ocean and that man that might be the one for whom she is waiting. She lets the silence play on the waves that tumble in, one after another. So too does Flint. They are waiting for the same man, Madi realizes. 

“I know that he,” he starts, voice hoarse; Madi’s eyes are still searching the water. “That you two have been working closely together of late. Become friends even. I don’t know what I’m trying to say…” His exhale shakes and he gives himself time to catch up to his nerve.

“Perhaps just that… He is my friend too,” he finishes, helplessly. Flint has a crew full of men lost, captured, injured, or shocked. But he hasn’t given up on Silver either. She turns to face him. His spirit is bent with the same ache that she feels. It is palpable. He is bracing for the same loss. The conversation evaporates as the longboat scrapes the sand. There is no air only waiting, four men stand and the  _ fifth _ … has sodden, black hair. Madi and Flint are frozen on the cusp of a step. As the fifth man turns into the sun, it’s not Silver. 

The sting of disappointment prickles her eyes and threatens to bowl her over. From her peripheral she can see Flint knocked by the same loss of hope.  _ You love him too.  _ She blinks, holding back the tears. It’s too much to process. It  **cannot** end like this. She turns back to Flint but he is already marching up the beach, duties unforgotten. Madi must remember her own duties. She braces herself and leaves the beach. 

\--

She is weary of, wearied  _ by _ , but not scared of, Flint. She watches him stomp and grand stand and scheme. Madi scrapes at her bean mash, unbothered. The ship’s table swings in a way that makes the mash that much less appetizing. Flint sits alone too. Madi leans her elbows onto the table and lets herself sway with it. Flint looks as miserable as she feels. There are no monsters, just men. Flint is a man. Ornery, brutal, and tempestuous, sure...but still just a man. She has seen him bleed. She has seen his heart. She will not allow him to overpower her or this resistance on the basis that he is anymore than a man. 

It is by this defiance that they find themselves with Billy on the Underhill Plantation. Flint is irate but keeps himself together. It’s by her orders and Billy's that their cause gains vast supplies of corn and grain. Yet it is also by her hand that they've imperilled the very people they sought to free from this place. In securing the weapons cache weeks ago she's turned the plantations for miles into tinder boxes. For if one slave can rebel, might they not all do so?

She underestimated the cruelty that would be roused by this rebellion. She stands next to Ruth in the parlor of Underhill knowing now that to liberate one plantation is to damn the families of those people she's freed. They have all been separated, scattered like seeds across the interior of the island so that husbands might be used to persuade wifes to resist the coming rebellion. This is her mistake. 

She turns to Flint and he understands. Billy does not. She’s backed the wrong horse and now her people will pay. Flint stands beside her as she changes her tact. He doesn’t flinch to aid her. The people enslaved here are not expendable, he argues to Billy. The potential of their alliance is paramount. And it is then, at length, that she sees that thing that Silver must see in Flint. For the first time she believes that  _ Flint  _ believes in the revolution he sold her. They believe in the same revolution.

It is not just Nassau they are fighting for. They aim to overthrow that stayed idea that  _ this  _ is all they deserve...that the law is just, that the generational bondage of her people is just, that one man can have much while all others are ground into dust. She sees the defiance in his eyes and she trusts him. 




He wakes up intermittently, disoriented, and exhausted. This man whose face he glimpses in the dark hauls him, bodily, over the strand. There's nothing but sand; sand in his mouth, in his sleeves, in his shoes, in my eyes. He wonders if he's finally made it to hell. 

He opens his eyes to the bright Nassau morning, no less exhausted and covered in sand. He can't say if the feeling in his chest is relief or disappointment. He's in the shade of the wreck ships. How many ships did they lose in the onslaught? How many men?  _ Where’s Madi. Flint? _ Another man is bloodied and sobbing tied not too far from him. Silver tries to move and finds that he is bound at the wrists. 

Death looms so near. How he's managed to evade it these last hours, he doesn’t know. The wild eyed man who brought him here at last shares his ill intent. He'll sell ‘Long John’ to the governor. And truthfully it is not the fear of England's reprisal that presses heaviest upon Silver. It is the twitchy, erratic, but no doubt powerful will of this stranger. 

The look in this man's hard eyes is the look of a cornered animal-- the look of man with nothing left to lose. This man can and will do anything, killing Silver is not only possible, but imminent. Silver shifts beneath his shackled arms. Silver has plenty of words, but which will reach a man so wholly withdrawn from reason? And it's always the simplest plans that work. To speak to a man, you must know his language. This man has wild eyes, but it is his right eye that's important. It is a puckered hollow that carries this man's story. A story that Silver knows.  _ Israel Hands.  _

Israel Hands is a true believer, so all Silver has to do is make him believe. And for a moment as he spins a tale of Long John Silver--of his wrath, of his power, of his capacity...he believes it too. Like the rage, the lie is sweet. He wears it, laces his fingers through the sleeves of Long John, let's himself grow wide with the bravado of it.  _ Yes,  _ he will bring down the governor.  _ Yes, _ he will bring justice to Nassau. And yet...is that all? Is that it? Where in all this sand and blood is his Madi? Like the rage, the lie, is not enough to sustain him. 


	10. Blood

Priestess she had been for some time. Queen too, if by proxy. But she is a warlord now. The blood and the tears that cling to that title taste different than the blood and tears of tending. There is bitterness mixed with these juices. A potent cocktail. She didn't think it would taste like this but it’s thrilling. 

She wars the only way she knows how. She wars like Flint taught her. She finds the rage born from the deepest parts of herself, of her mother, of her people, and she wears it like armor until she becomes something more than human. Until the rage and righteousness become fuel and she is the beacon by which armies might set their course.

There are men she knows and men she does not. They bend to her like leaves to a breeze and she finds that if she concentrates her will they are able to achieve the tasks she lays out. After all this time wishing and waiting, standing in the shadow of her mother, she has finally come out into the sun. With every inch of territory they claw from the British, Madi feels a cleansing heat boil over the island. A New Providence without slaves, a Nassau home--she can see these things when she closes her eyes. 

Men come back gored and bloodied or not at all. There are not enough bandages. They’re running low on shot. Their rations are dwindling. Billy’s men are on the plantations razing the shreds of their tenuous alliances to the ground. But she believes in this war more than ever. Every set back brings the end goal into clearer focus. 

She swallows, throat tight, around the memory of Silver falling into blue water. Perhaps, the pain of it proves the depth of her feelings for him. Likewise, every enemy gunshot and unjust reprisal on the slaves here prove the urgency and justice of their cause. If Madi has nothing else, she has faith in this cause. The cost is steep, but the prize is invaluable. 

She walks the edge of their shanty camp. Let the blood become water, she thinks, let this sacrifice prepare the soil for the future. She prays for the dead and swears a silent oath to lead their living brothers with honor. 




He is fascinated and afraid of whatever’s bloomed between them. The last time he saw them together he had to remind Madi not to further inflame Flint’s fears that their alliance was coming to naught. Now, here she stands, as capable of finishing his own thoughts as Flint’s. He should be happy that they’re finally getting along. Somehow it’s hard to find joy in it...

There are layers to their conversation that he can sense, but cannot make sense of, jokes between them belied by the smirks. He stands hands clenched like he does in the belly of the  _ Walrus _ watching potatoes roll in the barrel as the ship tilts. When did this ship start tilting? They stand taller in front of him now than they did in his mind. Warriors. Unbowed by doubt. Audacious. Willing to chip the castle apart, brick-by-brick, until their fingers are nubs and all that stands is ashes.

He has to laugh, there’s no other way to live with the knowledge that he stands by the grace of their legs. There is no other way to live with the knowledge that they share the space inside his bones but that he might be nothing more than a tick to them. It scares him to death and so he laughs.

A group of former slaves come into the room and Madi and Flint are swept away in plans. They don’t sleep. They don’t stop. Their ambitions for what this war can achieve inflate with every small victory. It doesn’t matter to them that they come back bloodied, or hobbled, or bruised. It doesn’t matter that more of their blood lies baked into the street than inside them. And he wishes he could find the humor in that, but it’s simply not there. 

_ “If anyone is at risk of being consumed by his war...it’s her,”  _ rings Billy’s voice. Silver watches Flint walking alongside Madi and swears he sees the man smile. No doubt, Silver’s missing another reference. They’ve become  _ so easy _ with one another. Silver grinds his teeth. Is anyone or anything easy with either of them? The breath sticks to his lungs. Madi gives Flint a look and he speaks on it. Just like that. 

Men corral around them, nodding, shouting, ready to bleed for them. Ready to  _ die _ for them. Ready to die for Long John Silver. Silver scrapes his heel in the dirt. A thought itches at the back of his skull--the thought that neither Flint nor Madi can let this war go. Not while they have men. Not while they have the means, and the will, and the breath. Silver can only think of two things he’d fight for like that...

Unlike Flint or Madi, Silver is uninterested in pain. He doesn’t care about the martyrdom of Charles Vane. He doesn’t care about the sacrifice of Mr. Scott. He cannot see these things as inspirational. They do not move him to action. He cannot find any beauty in suffering, or loss, or death. And God, if he hasn’t sorted the barbs and cuts of his life to try. He’s lost a leg and more to men, to this island, to this war. No pain he's weathered has made him a better person. No moment of tragedy has grown in him a stronger capacity to love. 

When, at night, he loses himself to revelry, when the fantasies of tomorrow overcome him, it is his friends he sees. It is the people that, despite all reason to leave him to his fate, intervened on his behalf. It is  _ Madi. _ It is  _ James _ . To a lesser extent, it is men aboard the  _ Walrus.  _ And even for all his wrongs, it is Billy. __

Later, looking up at the yellowed plaster ceiling of the old inn, the room empty save for him and his thoughts, he realizes that there is no hate strong enough to forge love and no pain acute enough to drown it. Alone in the low light, separate strings of information knit themselves into a coherent thought. He will not choose between irreplaceable things. 

These things that he’s done--will do--he does for love. He throws the blanket off and rummages in his coat, fingers finding the long traveled letter. The seal cracks under his blade. The paper is smooth. The hand that penned this reply, steady and bold. “ _ Yes,” _ it reads, “ _ yes a man such as you have described is here.” _ And so he's found the man that all these years was assumed dead. The man in whose name Flint would set the world ablaze. 

Thomas Hamilton. 

He rubs his thumb over the name like he can reach back through to Georgia and feel Thomas there. It is more than curiosity. He knows not what… But the need to know this man, to see him, is overwhelming. He needs to know what is to be more than a tick--to be an equal...a better even. It itches at him alongside every complicated feeling of James. His teeth set as he read the rest of the page, eyes returning to the name.  _ This is his Madi...this is his heart _ , Silver thinks. What Silver is to James, he still doesn’t know.  _ Something.  _

Only love breeds love. Only love can build love. So he’s doing this for love not selfishness, he tells himself folding the letter and slipping it into his pocket. Rigging the field to ensure a favorable outcome is an act of preservation. This will save all of them: James, Thomas Hamilton… all the men ready to die for this war. Madi. They’ll all be safe if he can do this for them. 


	11. I make no sense without you

He doesn't know what to be without her. He's lost the context and the verse. The tether that anchors him to reality is snapped. Time drags and lags and speeds at uneven intervals. He can't remember a thing about himself that he likes. Can't remember a thing about the world worth having. He oscillates between wanting to drown himself in the sea and drowning himself in drink. 

All objects hold her ghost. He touches nothing. He touches everything. 

He sees her behind him in the mirror in the captain's quarters. He feels her touch on his pillows. Smells her scent on the bed. Hears her voice in the night time air. 

He can't banish the thought that she needs something of his to take with her. An offering, like what she gave to her father… What would she have wanted? Nothing feels like enough. 

His nerves are hot and frayed. He teeters often on a mania, laughing at nothings until he feels sick. Other times he feels nothing--not hunger, not pain, not joy or sorrow--for hours or days at a time. Other times still he cannot stop the deluge of tears, of pain. He begs for the sea to swallow him. He prays for time to rewind so that he might die first and not have to live without her.

He opens her books, trying to feel the warm hands that held them a hundred times before. He reads the same sentence a hundred thousand times, eyes blurring. He throws the books in rage, rescues them in despair. He tries simultaneously to hold himself together and let himself unravel. 

He can no longer see any reason. It all seems senseless. The shape he took, the crevices of Madi's light that he flowed into to find form, crumble. He hates himself. He cannot go back to what he was before her--hates that version of himself most. He cannot be who he was with her, now that she is gone. He feels cut in half. He feels like less than half. 

He follows Flint by default. He follows Flint because he's fighting for the thing that Madi believed in. He follows Flint because Flint has been here in the darkness and learned to survive. He follows Flint and tells himself that, because the world cremated his heart, he may burn the world for justice. 

\--

He’s been running on adrenaline for days, frothed himself into a frenzy that she was alive and on that ship. He’s been ready to burn heaven and earth all day. And then suddenly everything slows to a crawl. He’s in the hull. The shells of artillery above him quiet to a buzz. Somewhere down here is Madi. And he doesn’t know,  _ God _ , he doesn’t know how she will be when he finds her. Not after this...

The staccato of wood on wood, crutch on plank is indistinguishable from the drumbeat inside him.  _ Madi. God. Madi.  _ There’s nothing but crates and the looming horror that she’s not here or worse. He rounds the corner breath swimming in his chest at the glimpse of movement.  _ Madi! _ But it’s not her. It’s a man, young with long, limp hair that hangs over his face: the cook. The anger that shoots through Silver at this irony is meant for everyone and no one and so it is launched at this man.

“You had a prisoner here...is she still alive? Is she still alive?!” 

And it’s the most scared he’s ever been, glued in the doorway not sure whether to cross the threshold or to pretend he doesn’t see her slumped there, unmoving. The cook didn’t know. No one knows. Maybe if he walks away this moment will disappear. Maybe he’s walked into the nightmare outcome of this day by accident and if he can only wake up… 

The chill starts in his arms and climbs into his spine.  _ Is she still alive?  _ She was alive today. He saw her on the deck a ship length or an ocean away.  _ Is she still alive? _ Madi isn’t moving. She’s covered in dirt, chained ankle to ankle.  _ My mother shielded me from all of it,  _ he remembers her saying, _ I don’t remember Nassau and here I’ve always been free.  _ He’s vibrating up to his teeth.  _ Madi?  _ His bones threaten to shake apart from the horror of it all. 

And then she  _ moves _ , perfect face turning to him like waking up from a dream. He runs to her. It's not until he can feel her soft and solid beneath his fingers that his lungs understand how to breathe. “Madi,” he gasps, the other noises of pain and relief come of their own volition. Her forehead to his is the lever that cranks his stalled mind into working. There’s no noise, only breathing. He kisses her and everything becomes real again. She pulls him out of the darkness like she promised she would. 


	12. We are (not) the same

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: reference to sex

He’s walked away from Flint about a hundred times, but it’s never seemed to stick. This time will be the last time. He doesn’t know how to feel about it. Flint is quieter and quieter the longer they sail. All the argumentation, all the fight leaks out of him. Savannah is a green sunrise on the horizon. 




If she did not heed the warnings about him, it was not because she was deaf to them. The derision with which her own men beheld him was apparent enough to any onlooker. What her men saw she knew--he was one of  _ them.  _ A pirate, a slaver. 

She heard the stories his men told. She watches the stormfront claw over the horizon. Lightning illuminates slate clouds flashing purple then white. The wind screams and whistles through the slits in the hut. Madi stands unmoved in the center of the room as the walls shake. 

Is she hard headed? He’d never spoken to her except with candor. “ _ There are no exceptions, Madi, we are all the same to them.”  _

She wants to believe, as she has always believed, that he is different. He is not the amalgam of every dark caricature of piracy nor of colonial oppression. But he is born of the tree. Is she stupid for trusting him? Damned for loving him still? It feels so much like betrayal now. Did she remove her crown to be with him? It is that question above all others that repeats rat-ta-tat rat-ta-tat with the drum beat in her chest. Did she do this? Allow this? Embolden this? 

She can’t imagine his rationale, cannot hold in her mind the reasons--the methods by which he’s done this unimaginable thing. She doesn’t need to imagine. Their effort is dismantled by his hand, their numbers dispersed by his doing. Flint...what did he do to Flint?

She wants to pretend he hasn’t. She visualizes herself pulling on the reins of this war like she’d done yesterday and watching ship after ship, island after island of people join their cause.  _ Their  _ cause: those currently or formerly enslaved. Her cause: one at peril of enslavement. Flint’s cause: one who’s seen the injustice of British rule, who’s suffered personal loss at Britain’s hand. The pirate’s cause: those who were pushed so far to the peripheries of honest live as to become outlaws by necessity. 

Was it ever Silver’s cause? 

Can one unbound to the past truly grasp the opportunities or the consequences of the future? She lets the tears fall now because she knows this grief must come and she is as helpless to its onslaught as she is to the dissolution of her dreams of victory.




“We are not the same.” 

He doesn’t know what that means, nothing except the unvoiced ‘but’ has reached him yet. Maybe nothing else matters. He knew this might be the outcome. He knew on Skeleton Island, he’d known before that. If he’s being honest with himself, he’s known that this sanctuary he’s carved in Madi’s heart was never his to have in the first place. It doesn’t make sense to keep arguing.

“You could never save them all,” he says because it’s true and he needs to meet her somewhere that they can agree. 

“You didn’t let me  _ try.” _   


_ I helped you win,  _ he wants to say,  _ I gave you the most we could hope to get.  _ He feels his shoulders slump around his ribs like his body is trying to hold itself together. Madi takes a step toward the door and it’s unbearable knowing that even if he moved as fast as he could he wouldn’t be fast enough to stop her. All he can use is his voice and she doesn’t seem to hear him anymore. 

“I already lost you once, Madi.” Even saying the words reconjures the gut wrench of freefall. The bile rises to the back of his throat as it constricts. She hesitates in the doorway. If she would just look at him maybe he could keep her there for one more moment. But he can’t will the words to come. There is nothing left to say, because he knows that this is a fruitless line of argumentation.  _ He  _ wants to save her from dying in this war. She would let herself die if it meant fighting on.

But he can’t let it go. He won’t let Madi go, not when he’s come this far to keep her. 

“Wasn’t it you who told me that, given the opportunity to reconcile with England, your people would take it? ...Madi.” If she doesn’t care about herself then she cares about them. “How many men would you have sent to their deaths?” His words are sharp, hooking into Madi and prying her from the doorframe and further into the room. “Every man out there looked me in the face with  _ relief  _ when I brought them those pardons! I am not so cruel as to think that means nothing to you.” 

“How long will that peace last?”

“I don’t know,” he answers. “But it guarantees mothers their sons today.” And Madi is really looking at him now. The hard thing in her eyes cracks open stirring her eyebrows as its mist sets over her eyes. 

“It’s my job to protect them,” she says in a broken voice. 

“How can you do that if you cannot stand?”  _ If you aren’t alive? _ His voice is thrown into the same disarray, he knows that she understands his meaning. And he knows that he hurt her, and that it doesn’t really matter why he’s done it. The hurt he inflicted is as real as the tears running down her face and for that--for  _ that _ \--he is sorry. Still...there’s no other choice worth living with. He’s already tried to live without Madi and found nothing in it but sand and darkness. Madi’s stuck a floorboard away like she’s nailed in place. He closes the distance.




Her hands are rough where once they were soft. Their teeth clank. She’s needy.  _ He’s needy. _

She hates him and hates him and fucks him until she too tired to hate or fuck him anymore. 




She pulls away and he groans, sitting up to follow her. The flat of her palm cups his face. She is sweat slicked and the taste of her lingers in his mouth. He wants her closer. Lids heavy with lovemaking, her eyes focus on him and his spirit feels naked. “ _ Where are you? _ ”  _ Here _ , he thinks.

“You are enough,” she whispers. She's angry enough to cry, but she doesn't or can't. 

The words ring out like they’ve been shouted into a cave, an echoing chorus. And he is a child: When the words settle over his stomach, plant themselves in his chest to be watered by the rain from his eyes. And he thinks about how touching Madi that first time, bare--skin to skin to skin--was the best moment of his life. And about how holding her, soaked to the thigh with seawater and breathless at the bottom of that accursed ship when he knew that she wasn’t dead, that he’d saved her was the best moment of his life. And he thinks about how every moment that she’s here with him is the best moment. And how  _ this _ is the best moment. 




She doesn’t know she can forgive him until she does. Wet and panting, fingers clenched in his hair, she knows she will never let him go. Knows they are an indelible part of one another’s stories. Knows the pain of denial would kill them both. And for that knowledge fucks him harder.


	13. Burying the Crown

That they cannot stay here is clear to Madi. She just needed time to make peace with it. She’s seen the ransom notices and wonders what the authorities will do when they find out that Captain Flint is no longer an adversary. What lies will they concocked to claim his defeat? Her nails dig half moons into her palms.

Wherever he’s sent Flint, part of Silver is there too. That bothers her more than the rest of it. She thought she knew where the mask ended and he began, but now she fumbles again to tease apart the truth from the lies. The anger crackling in her chest refuses to be smothered. Perhaps she is angry to learn how much of her own identity is built relationally to a world she assumed was static. There is no more war and no island and no people. Only the prospect of a lasting freedom clothes her from the open sky. 

How many lives has she sacrificed to the promise of a better tomorrow? How many more will die because she failed. It’s like counting stars, impossible to hold all the variables in one head. The bright day seems grey. She sits with her regret until she can’t, then she cleans and launders and patches and bandages and cooks and feeds. There are still people here. But who is she to them now?

Flint is still out there, in Savannah or somewhere else. Freedom is still out there. Maybe it is here too? Maybe the compact they’d signed has settled freedom here. She tries to anchor herself in today. Today there are children racing between huts. Today there are people reunited with their loves. The only people on this island are friends. All her enemies lie abroad.  _ For today… _

She has seen the random notices for Captain Flint and Long John Silver...seen the bounty for herself. They will come. England will come. Sooner or later. 

She wrings bloody water from a bandage and hangs it to dry. With ginger fingers she wraps Chidi’s wound. How much of his blood has she washed from her hands? Chidi puts a bracing hand on her knee as she ties the bandage. He is younger than she is, but his face is weathered. The look in his eyes speaks of sacrifice and loss. It is time for him to rest. Let his blood be repaid now with rest. She helps him lie down. 

And suddenly a thought, an epiphany: Free people do not need queens. Like all epiphanies it is obvious in its retelling. There is no way to return a power that lies within the people. Madi digs a hole in the trees beside her father’s grave--let her crown rest with him. Kneeling in the dirt she lets her tears water the graves until she feels empty. When she stands up again she is not a princess, not a queen. When she stands up she is just Madi. She stumbles on faun legs to find her bed. 

On the last day, Madi meets Silver on the cliffside overlooking the bay. A single ship bobs in the waves. There was a time, months ago, when the port was overrun with sloops and brigantines. What’s left of the revolution has moved onto other islands. The port is full of fishermen in little row boats that drift halfway up the horizon before washing back into the strand. This is the first ship to make berth here in days.  _ The Persistence. _ She’s a frigate manned by 40 men, notwithstanding the captain. She is en route to stock up on sea biscuit and supplies in Port Royal. 

Since the first time when she'd tasted his tongue she knew Silver was the type of man that could build you up or raze you to the ground. They watch the  _ Persistence  _ and know that they will be watching this cliff from her decks.  _ Let this be a new start.  _

“I’m ready,” she says. 




He exists between the blue skies and the blue seas. Silver thinks about the first time he emerged into the hot air of the Carribean. The cold, wet of England had so burrowed into his bones that he didn’t know that he’d ever be warm again. That ship had made land on a small island before proceeding into Port Royal. A small island, he remembers, all sand and trees. It seemed to him that every tree was laden with fruit, every well of water crystal blue. 

_ “You walk out on this and where the fuck are you going?”  _ He stands on the  _ Persistence  _ wondering too. 


	14. Bristol

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Miscarriage

They end up in Bristol for the same reason they ended up in Port Royal and Montserrat and eventually Angra do Heroísmo before. They are drifters. The marketability of their skills has been reduced to domestic labor. Madi is the better cook but cooking work finds Silver instead. Most homes have women and so have cooks. Only ships have no cooks, but ships do not lightly suffer the presence of a woman. So Silver cooks and Madi launders. 

It is no life, or when she is optimistic, it is life only at the margins. Like burnt meat, it is a life that requires scraping off the burns and gnawing the slender remnants of meat nearest the bone. It fills you, but the taste is only of ash. Washing is hard. The long, waterlogged skirts weigh as much as a man. Beating the water from shirts strains the muscles in the arm and shoulder. The chemicals stink and burn.

It is honest work but with dishonest patrons. She has thrice returned baskets of freshly folded clothing only to be short changed or, once, to have the pick-up boy run out not having paid at all. And then she is left sore and water withered with only enough money for salt fish and ale waiting for Silver to return. It is no life. So they go to Monserrat. And then Angra. And then, by some strange pitch in wind: Bristol. 

Bristol starts much the same. Washing. Cooking. Then, by pure chance even though the world is wide, Madi runs into a man she’s seen before. Morgan. A  _ Walrus  _ man. Madi stashes the basket of laundry in a doorway and follows him to a run down old tavern by the docks. Although there was never much friendship between them, he recognizes her and agrees to sit for a glass. 

When the whiskey hits they talk of a great many things. Nassau. The war....Flint. “May he find peace in that place,” Morgan says, spearing a potato. “The labor there looked as hard as any ship.” Madi blinks. 

“The labor?” she asks. 

“Sent him to a plantation, di’nt he?” 

Madi nods slowly. “You saw it?”

“Me ‘n Hands. Was a fast trip all things considered. I never see’d the captain so meek, like all the fight’d gone outta ‘im. Becalmed.” The last word was almost a question, like Morgan was still considering what he’d seen. The thought is soon abandoned for the hind of some beast. Madi thanks him for his time and passes on news of Silver. 

“Hmmf! If Long John is still kickin’ tell ‘im the least he can do is find us some better food,” the pirate jokes, throwing down the ravaged bone. Madi looks around the greasy, run down place. She’ll tell him. 




She motions up casually. Before him sits a squat, two-story tavern with moss slimed shingle and charred windows that seem to indicate that the building’s been on fire more than once. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with his face so he tries for a smile. He is  _ very  _ confused.

“It’s ugly, but not without potential,” Madi says, with the same abundance of optimism she’d had about her since she ran into Morgan--of all people--a few days before. 

“She is ugly,” he agrees. 

“And the food is terrible.”

“Uh huh…” he turns to look at, just to make sure he isn’t being hazed here. But no, same sane, beautiful wife. “So you want me to cook here instead of on the  _ Fleetfoot? _ To be honest I think the  _ Fleet _ is safer.” It starts as a joke but then a large splinter of the doorframe comes away as he goes to let them in. They look at each other and she can hear what he’s thinking but still just smiles.

“I want us to buy it,” she says as the door stutters open. 

_ “ _ Oh.”  _ Oh God. _ The interior of the place lives up to the omens of the outside. No two tables match. The hearth is an ash heap. A passing glimpse of the kitchen looks like it may be an ash heap too. A good number of the chairs have been forcibly reduced to three legs and well… _ ”You can sympathize?”  _ ribs James’ phantom.  _ Something like that, _ Silver thinks. 

Madi is smiling the whole time. He scratches at his beard trying to be objective about his valuation. She gives him her hand over the table with a sweet look from those dark eyes. He’ll do it. He’ll do whatever she wants. All he needs to do is figure out how to make it make money.




_ “Where are you _ ,” her father asks in her dreams. He stands from his bed of flowers shaking the black soil from the crown in his hands. “ _ Where are you, daughter?” _ They stand behind him row after row. Their black skin glistening in the pale gloam. They hold mangoes and trowels and scepters and babies. Their hair is braided or locked or open or shaved. So many faces. “ _ Where are you _ ,” they ask in unison. 

Madi wakes up, heart like a drum in her ears. She peels Silver’s hand from her thigh and shifts from the bed. It is raining again. It is raining _ still _ . It rains and rains and rains and Madi wonders how this place has not become one with the sea it is so wet. She pulls a wool shawl from the chair. It is a rocking chair like the one that lives with her mother. She takes the inkpot and a sheaf of paper from a drawer and tiptoes into the kitchen. She writes her mother again, though none of the other letters have yet met with a response. 

None of the letters say anything more than that she is alive or that she misses her mother, but she writes them anyway. She opens the tight spined Bible that existed in this place when she and Silver bought it, and from its pages gathers the last pressed flower of summer. It is a cornflower, blue like Silver’s eyes, blue like the necklace on her dead father. She kisses it to her lips and slips it into the letter. 

She seals each one with a prayer, whispered in the old tongue, that the letter may reach its destination. That her heart might reach across the water and be felt by the heart of her mother.  _ This one will.  _ She’ll send this one with Mr. Dooley and it will make it. She pokes coals in the fire and decides that her time is better spent preparing today’s meals than fighting sleep. 

She peels the potatoes and begins to slice a bowl of onions. Her stomach rolls with the smell. The first solid chop releases a spray of pungence and Madi barely makes it to a chamberpot before losing her stomach. Her breath mists in the cold of the tavern, hands shaking against the pot.  _ Three times makes a pattern, _ she thinks. Fear battles with elation. 




It hurts less if he just lives in today. Today everything is alright. The wood creaks beneath the hammer as Silver drives fresh nails into the sign.  _ The Spyglass, _ it reads. They’ve owned the place for over just over a year but it feels official now. All he needs is for Samson to help him put it back up. The boy should be in around half five and their regulars know the place already. 

The lunch crowd is starting to trickle in and he can hear their busboy scurrying around. Silver idles by the foot of the stairs wondering how she’ll be when he heads up. Thirsty, he shouldn’t wonder, she hasn’t been down all day. He fills a tankard and tucks the crutch under his arm to begin his ascent. It's quiet. He walks in on Madi shearing her locks off by the handful and drops the tankard with a clatter. 

“Madi?” he shouts, because the crack of the tankard shakes his already brittle nerves and volume is sailing its own course. To her credit she doesn’t so much as flinch at the sudden cacophony. “What’re you doing?” His voice is softer now, he's ignoring the puddle of grog pooling in the doorway to stand beside her chair. 

“I’m cutting my hair,” she monotones as she saws off the last handful of long, soft hair. “There’s no one here to help me do it.” What hair remains is cottony and uneven. He can see that she’s planning to get rid of it all. He squeezes her shoulder struggling for a tether to pull her from this darkness. 

“Here,” he says, moving to take the blade from her hand, “let me help.” Her glassy eyes meet his in the spotted mirror as he holds her hand over the handle. Their eyes meet though he doubts that she is seeing him. The tavern door opens with a jingle below them, a group of loud men tromping in. The hurt in Madi’s eyes is uncomfortably familiar in a way that summons James and all his prophecies. “ _ You’ll have lost her anyway. _ ”  _ She’s here. She’s still here. _

Their busboy shouts a hello. Can’t everyone just be quiet? 

And Madi is. She blinks away a damn of tears before her hand goes limp as she buries her face into his side. She is silent. Tears soak his shirt so that he can feel their hot agony bleeding into his stomach. He discards the knife onto the table and holds her. 

Tuesday’s nightmare seeps back into him. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do or say. Doesn’t know how to mourn someone he only had hopes for but no memories of. Doesn’t know how to hold himself so that he stays together. Doesn’t know how to heal Madi from the trauma of this. He holds her, bends into her kissing her head, watering it with his tears. 

The girl they’ve hired to help around the kitchen tip toes up to ask whether she might fetch a bag of flour to start another batch of rolls. She pointedly avoids mentioning the broken tankard or the pile of locks on the floor or the palor of Madi’s face. He sends away with the coin for the flour and closes the door. 

He cuts Madi’s hair with a steadiness that he does not feel. Her femininity is only increased by the juxtaposition of hairlessness. She is beautiful, hair or no, child or no. 




“ _ When you wage a war on the world, the world fights back,”  _ her mother said once. 

The words are on her as she wakes up. When, after months, she finishes saving herself, there is no one left to save. She builds a wall around what’s left. The Spyglasses’s walls are replastered to ward off the seeping cold. There are children, first one then four that make their way into her employ. It takes a few years, but the shutters are torn off and new ones are hinged on. 

The red hot skin around Silver’s thigh festers one winter. Something in the wood and iron prosthetic, maybe. Madi tries to make the poltices she remembers, but the ingredients don’t grow here. The substitutions are poor. She is no Fremah. She holds his hand as the barber brings the saw. The leg comes off to the hip. The iron leg is drowned in the bay and Silver is drowned in pints of whiskey, argues with the bird. There’s plenty of work to do in the tavern. The four children that work here have become adults and the tavern is empty. Madi finds other urchins to take in.

  
Silver is hard. Not empty, just closed. There are no words for it, only time. He comes back when he is ready. Madi waits because he’s waited before. Madi waits because they have both lost this part of him. The Spyglass sign needs repainting. It’s a thing to do. There are refugees, people that could have been her people. She feeds them and connects them to her people here. The hearth is emptied for the first time and the fresh fuel makes the tavern warmer. Silver nudges her hand as she paints and the red sign border gets an unplanned flourish.  _ Cad, _ she smiles to herself. The tavern is a small kingdom, but a strong one.


	15. The Parrot

The parrot is huge and green with a mask of red feathers for a head. If it didn’t sail in on one of the ships docked in the harbour then Silver’s not sure where it came from. It hops through the open door of the Spyglass and flaps up onto a crumb laden table. He tries to shoo it and it snaps at him. The resulting shout of surprise is what rouses Madi. 

“This glorified pigeon just tried to bite me!” 

Madi steps toward it, no heed toward the danger he’s just announced. The parrot tips its head and squawks at her. Madi looks between the offending bird and Silver, shrugging. 

“No!” he says to her expression, “that thing almost bit my finger off.” Madi smirks and walks back toward the kitchen.

“We’re almost out of nutmeg.” Silver shakes his head and watches the door swing shut behind her. He wipes the table around the quarrelsome creature. 

“Rrrrawg nutmeg!” it yells when he looks at it again.

“Oh you’re a real piece of work.”

He spends the better part of the day chasing the parrot around the inn, keeping the parrot from pecking at patrons, swiping crusts from it’s sharp,  _ sharp _ beak. By providence alone, he manages to get the parrot out of doors. 

Opening the door the next morning to air the place, a strange shadow catches his attention. It’s the parrot. It’s large green body is perched atop the chipping paint of the inn’s signage. Does the parrot exist only to spite him? He balances himself against the doorframe, smacking his crutch against the sign as the thing squeaks and crows and hisses wings wide and eyes wild.  _ I’ve bested devils bigger than you _ , Silver thinks spitefully. The parrot flutters off the sign and onto the roof flying away when Silver smacks at the shingle. 

A day passes and then another and the inn remains bird free. He begins to forget about the thing. He pours an extra pint of ale for a favorite while negotiating better spice prices with Misters Leeman and Lahr who owe him a favor after the introduction to the Dutch fellows he arranged several weeks prior. He’s happily haggling for nutmeg when he spots a dreaded green. 

Madi is passing chunks of sailor’s biscuit up to the monster on her shoulder. It looks at him with yellow eyes, pleased to litter his floor with crumbs. Silver pretends not to notice. A half hour later he hands Madi the receipt of sale for the crate of Indian spices. 

“I’m sorry...did you let the parrot back in here or did it come find you?” he asks after a long moment of silence. 

“I found him on the sign when I was emptying the chamber pots.” She’s reading through the receipt. And of course the thing was on the sign again. 

“And it just...climbed onto your shoulder?”

“I told it to come down.”

Silver rests a hand over his now gaping mouth, listening to this story become less believable. 

“And it listened?” he asks. Madi is tucking the receipt into her apron, pushing out of the bench to stand. 

“Mmm?” 

“You said the parrot was on the sign, and you told it to come down. And just like that it fluttered down and without biting or maiming you, decided the two of you would be friends? Just like that?”

“Maybe it recognises royalty,” Madi deadpans, tossing the parrot a crumb. Silver laughs despite himself. 

“Funny,” he says after her. And then it’s just him and the parrot again. “Did we get off on a bad foot?” He reaches to touch the parrot. It bites his finger with such vigor that the blood squirts across the cuff of his freshly laundered sleeve. “Ah ha ha,  _ fuck you _ ,” he mutters shoving his finger into his mouth to stem the flow of blood. The stain never comes up from his sleeve and the parrot never leaves.

\--

Either the parrot has always been cranky or, like many people Silver knows, has become cantankerous with age. By the latter standard, this parrot must be around 100 years old. The bird’s talons anchor into his shoulder as Silver feeds it table scraps. The thing tolerates him, but is grudging at best. Madi runs a thumb over it’s head and it smacks him in the face with a wing.  _ Insufferable. _ He doesn’t know when he starts calling the bird Flint, but it seems right as soon as he does. 

Silver reaches across the bench for his prosthetic, preparing himself for the day to come.

“You should switch to the crutch.” He tried to hide the blooming redness of his thigh, but clearly she’s spotted it. He sighs. There’s a man from the  _ Revenge _ coming in today, a man he’s met before and he’d really rather not be hobbling around. He starts to say so.

“I’m fine! I’m FINE!” the parrot insists before Silver can get a word out. Madi howls with laughter. The parrot hops shouting the phrase until Madi is doubled over and wheezing. Silver drops the iron and wood prosthetic glaring at them. He wonders in passing how good parrot would taste. Then, resigned, he stretches to pull the crutch off the walk, finding no comedy in the affair. 


	16. The Boy

_“Someday you’ll care,”_ whispers the memory. He wishes James would leave him alone. _“Even if you can persuade her to keep you… she’ll no longer be enough. And the comfort will grow stale.”_

“You’re wrong,” he says to the wash basin of dishes. The bird makes a sound like a scoff. “She is enough.” And she is. She is...

_ “You’re casting about in the dark… _ ” 

_ No, _ he thinks. He plunges his hand back into the frosty water, trying to ignore the repulsion he feels for the floating chunks of half-eaten food. He’s trying to ignore the fatigue of standing, and fetching, and serving, and smiling. 

_ “...for some proof that you mattered... and you’ll find none.”  _

His hands come down alongside the basin with a slap. “LEAVE me alone.” 

“ _ You gave it away.”  _

“I came home with the most valuable thing on that fucking island,” he hisses. Flint is unmoved, passive, like he too is tired. He stands there in Silver’s memory, arm’s crossed in the brown coat of Spanish leather, leaning against the wall. His red hair is short. 

“ _ You left it on that island.”  _ He never could argue with James. Sure, he could yell, or flail, or ignore him--shit Silver could even be right--when the man got an idea in his head it was there to stay. Silver shakes the water from his hands and steps outside into the sheets of mist and fog. James is already there. 

“ _ She believed in this...in you.”  _ Silver’s jaw pops with the force of his gritting teeth. He crosses his arms to brace from the cold. He breathes into the nightmare trying to keep his body limber enough to bear the onslaught.

“ _ The part of her...the part of us that mattered is still there.” _

“The only thing still on that island are dreams. And she still believes in me, she’s never stopped.” And that’s true. Mostly.

It’s an omen and an accident that he runs into Squire Trelawney later that week. He’s walking the docks looking at the ships to remind himself that he hates to sail. The squire stands out like lime in an apple barrel. He’s an easy mark, every gesture speaking of his wealth and inexperience. And if Silver’s been good these last few years, he’s no saint...

“Looking for a crew, I hear,” Silver says with a smile and the squire bends to him without hesitation. Silver knows plenty of men in need of an easy payment. The voyage the squire outlines is so much more than Silver could have dreamt up. It isn’t until he’s supped with the man that the full import of the voyage really hits him. After twenty years it’s the promise of the  _ Urca de Lima’s  _ gold that sits before him perpetually  _ just _ out of reach. Maybe it’s habit that causes him to run after it. In his imagination it’s only the green of James’ eyes that glitter out of the chest. 




“...a couple of weeks,” he says trying to keep her eye contact because he knows that begging is that much more pathetic if she looks directly at it. She busies herself getting dressed. They play tug of war with her sock. Madi glowers at him, planting her foot at the edge of the bed to roll the thing up over her thigh. Silver straddles her leg straightening the anchor at the ankle. 

“How many weeks?” she asks. Silver grins, running his hand up her leg. He pulls a fraying green ribbon from the bed and fastens it above her knee, folding the top of the sock over it. Taking his sweet time. “ _ John _ ?” He sighs burying his face into her leg. 

“Four or five to get there. A handful of days on the island. They’ve got a map. And then it’s a right back the way we came only ten times richer.” He bats those pretty lashes of his. 

“Six months?” she asks, pulling her leg away and tugging on the other sock, foot on the floor. 

“Four at the most,” he protests. She points at him as though she’s caught him. They have loud argument via gesture. Madi tosses him a shirt and pulls a long skirt over her shift. 

“Who made the map?” she asks in a level tone. 

“Huh?” 

“Who made the map?” She sets his trousers in his lap, resting a hand on his thigh to look into his face. “Flint and Dooley buried the chest. Dooley’s bones were in the ground before we left that island. Flint didn’t tell you where it is…” she looks at him, bracing him, even though they both know what she’s going to say. They still have the letter that said it. “He's dead. So...who made the map?”

Silver takes a long breath, chewing his lip,“...there’s a finite range of places he could have buried it.” Madi rolls her eyes. Six months seems conservative. 

“But why are you going?” she asks. He holds out his hand and she takes it, letting him pull her onto his lap. She rests her cheek against his hair. “Why now?” He plays with her fingers, letting time stretch as she melts against him. 

“Rackham told me once that that box held the blood of Vane, and Gates, and your father, and every man, woman, and child that died for our war… Flint told me that the box was the war. That leaving it behind meant leaving every dream and aspiration that the three of us shared.” 

Madi sits up to look at him. 

“And sometimes I wonder…” he starts softly, thumb brushing her cheek. He shifts under her and when finally he speaks the words come so deliberately that Madi wonders if he hasn’t practiced them. “There’s nothing I would have done differently. Every choice led me here. With you.”

He’s always been hopelessly sentimental about her. She doesn't always understand, but he’s never left her room to doubt his love. She presses her forehead to his. His hands cradle her bald head. “What do you wonder?” she prompts. He sighs.

“If I can live with the knowledge that England is pulling them from the ground.” Madi pulls back so that they can see each other as he continues. “I hear him driving me there.” __

“ _ James _ ?” 

Silver nods. Madi pauses. She’s had two decades to reflect on those times. On her decisions. On the men she trusted and followed and led. There are things about which she has no doubts. She loves freedom. She loves Silver. There were those for whom she was responsible, for whom she did the best she knew. For whom she fought. There are those she failed.

It was a righteous war, though she wonders if war can ever be righteous. She wonders if she was owed loyalty, if she was owed death. She still wonders if she forsook her people by bowing to their collective will. Wasn’t it her will that was divine, her vision that was true? She saw into the persecution promised by tomorrow, Flint saw it too. Flint promised it was righteousness rather than folly to push forward. 

But Flint was also notorious for his disregard for life, wasting men with a wanton regularity that still makes her sit awake at night. You cannot seed tomorrow in the love and freedom that you withhold from today, she thinks. There is no future for the dead. And yet freedom is a war that seems only to be won in the long game, a prize indifferent to those that toil for it today. She spins herself in circles...

For all her philosophizing she and Flint chose the same path that they railed at Silver for creating. All three choose personal love. She’s forgiven Silver for it a long time since. Most days she’s forgiven herself too. 

To this day, she can’t seem to forgive James. They wanted the same thing, she and Flint. They knew they needed one another to win the war that they started, and when they were on the cusp of inflaming the world in their holy crusade, he fell to Silver and dragged her along with him. 

John Silver sits beneath her trying to find her. He doesn't know: There is nothing left in that box but dust.

“Have I ever been able to stop you?” she asks in answer to his question. He doesn’t answer, only looks down. Perhaps a part of her meant it like that. The better part of her wants him to see that the furies have long gone to rest.  _ Go find the box.  _ She rucks up her skirt and removes the ribbon garters at her thighs. “Six months is a long time,” she says, undressing. 

“ _ Four _ months,” he insists. She shrugs as if to replace the garters and he grabs her by the wrists. The hard expression on his face is thawing. “Still too long,” he agrees, kissing her. 




He notices the boy before the bell on the door announces him. A scrawny thing, the boy has skin like golden almonds and black hair that hangs at his shoulders in tight ringlets. The child sneaks into the tavern, eyes like saucers. Silver crosses from the kitchen into the main room to get a closer look. He mops the dishwater from his hands with a rough cloth. 

The boy is small but sturdy like Silver at that age, with big, brown, intelligent eyes that remind him painfully of Madi’s. Who’s son is this? Silver approaches him. The boy crumples a scrap of paper in his nervous fingers, looking around as if he’s expecting someone. When the boy’s eyes meet his, the boy smiles. 

“Mr. Silver, sir?” he asks and Silver knows at once he’s here at the behest of the Squire. That providence should return him the prospect of the Urca gold and this apparition of a life lost seems really too much. 

“That’s my name to be sure... You must be the new cabin boy--Hawkins, was it?” Silver reaches out to shake the boy’s hand. 

\--

Silver follows the rails of the  _ Hispaniola _ watching young Jim bound back and forth over the deck looking over each side until the ship is too far from the Bristol harbour to see anything but sea and sky _.  _ Long forgotten dreams seat themselves at the front of Silver’s mind. Was that sort of adventure in his heart the first time he boarded a ship? Jim swipes the keys to the cabin off the Squire and laughs as the older man pats himself and spins in a circle chasing his pockets. Jim returns the keys and the squire tuts but laughs all the same. 

Silver leans on the gunwale. What will become of this child with Flint’s name, and Madi’s eyes, and his own sticky fingers? This child is a bittersweet phantom. In Silver’s story this child is his son, and he’s managed this one thing for Madi. In his story he is just Silver, not ‘Long John’. His story isn’t filled with ghosts or doubt or pain. His story is long and slow, and much too romantic for the adventurous lot. It's all adoration and home. The opposite of this. He looks out over the sea. Why should his ghost hunt be restricted to the ghosts in the chest, he jests ryely to noone. 

Sleep comes easy the first night. All his plans are in motion, the pieces moving exactly as intended and the promise of seeing the Urca gold again and sailing on a ship again give way to exhaustion. The sway of the hammock is familiar and his mind dips into the pull of unconsciousness. It's every night after the first that keeps him awake. 

After about a week he must decide whether he'll undo the braids that Madi plaited around his ears or let the hair mat. He leaves them for two days after this realization, pulling at them as though he can still feel her fingers there. If Madi were here she’d laugh at him for this, caress his ears as she combs out the felted hair. But Madi is not here and the sea is as vast and horrible as ever.

"Cold! Cold!" complains Flint between bouts of pecks and chomps at the sideboard by the stove. Silver can hear Madi in it. He feels the overwhelming and equally futile need to offer her his jacket. He puts down his half peeled potato, wipes his hands on the rag at his waist and gives the braids a final, reverent touch before unraveling them. He's taken this voyage by choice, he reminds himself.

A not insubstantial part of him wants Madi to ache like he aches. It’s completely irrational. He smothers the feeling at every crest by his overwhelming desire for her to be vibrant and resilient and flourishing. He wonders what it’s like to be as cocksure as he pretends to be. He wonders if he'll ever know. He thinks Madi might know. The bird pecks at his shoulder and Silver jumps. 

The closer they sail to the island the less he sleeps. So many men,  _ so many men _ , have died for that gold. Men with whom he shared stories and time and lives. Randall. Muldoon. Kofi. Joji. Gates. Dobbs. Dooley.  _ Billy.  _ And on. And on. And on. He carries their memories with him like the ghost of his leg, worthless now except to remind him of the past. 

There are still men whose blood must be paid for the gold. The Squire. The Captain. The Doctor. All the merry men whose simple hearts cannot be swayed by Silver’s tongue or the swords of his mutineers. There are parts of his life at sea that he's swallowed into the depths of himself. Yet the darkness comes into focus with every sailed league. 


	17. The Cache

Flint is closer with every league they sail. The salt crusted ocean spray, the grog soaked biscuits, the songs, the screams, the stink. It all comes back like he's woken up in a rewound reality. Maybe some part of him volunteered for this voyage to chase this nostalgia. He turns to Hands and thinks that the pirate only looks as worn as he ever did. 

He deftly avoids the splash and spray of disembarking the little rowboat only to be soaked to the skin by the air. The sun is a hard jewel in the sky. The wind is still. The island holds its breath for what unfolds next. Silver makes it up the pathless hill with great difficulty. Even padded, the crutch threatens to rub him raw. 

The odds are against the Squire and his men. Silver has the crew save less than 7 who have sided with Smollett. He has no doubt that Captain Smollett will fight the inevitable, but Silver's fought harder men for worse stakes. Just before the treeline breaks to expose the old ramshackle fort where the good Englishmen are holed up, he stops to catch his breath. 

If he closes his eyes he can pretend that he's 20 years younger and spry. If he closes his eyes he can pretend it's Madi or Flint he's leaning on. When he's no long sucking breath he straightens his shirt to get the captain's attention over the middling barricade. 

And Smollett that shit… refuses even to  _ hear  _ reason. Silver will never understand how men court death. Captain's don't survive mutinies, they survive  _ plots  _ and they are past that point now. He wonders if Smollett understands that and doubts it.

This wasn't supposed to be difficult. Madi laughs at him from the corner of his mind, or maybe it’s James. They sound so alike here under the derisive sun. 

He hasn’t seen this much blood since he sailed with Flint. 

Only one pistol hitches, the other fires true. The man on the other end gags and shakes as the bullet takes him in the neck. Then the range between his men and these is too short. The clang and tink of iron shakes through his arm and his ears. Men squeal and writhe and die, their blood watering the swamp grass. 

Who will remember their names? Silver took pains not to know them. Still he will not forget their faces. It's the eyes and the noise more than any other thing that sticks. It's the groan of the ship as it pitches leeward, water like an ox bowling over men and crates like ants. It's the heart drum  _ tattatatatat _ in the ears. Is the desperation in the gasps, the pity of the gurgle as the light is snuffed out of a man. Still he shoots and slashes and pushes until only his six men and the Squire’s five are alive.

He plays at forgetting. Sometimes the memory of Madi's breast is so deep that nothing but comfort can reach him. But the dead come back in dreams. In nightmares he is dragged into the dark water, canons booming above. The thing in the water picks alternating faces of horror and promises that killing them again will make them die for good. 

Every morning he wakes up feeling like he's had less sleep than before. Every morning he is surrounded by a handful of agitated men who promise to riot at the next grievance. He is tired, but a dark thing is feeding on the exhilaration of it. They will find the chest today if the map can be trusted.

He'll be dead if they can't…

The map maker's clues are inane holding to exactly the kind of theatricality Silver will retell the story with. Under a gnarled tree lay the remains of a man. Only the leather strap necklaces hints at his life. Silver recognizes him, even faceless. A  _ Walrus _ man. Silver's men see it too. The air is oppressive.

A voice cuts through the stillness that belongs to no man among them. Hairs rise on his arms. His heart beat thrums, suspended in the hot air. He turns, once, twice, trying to spot green eyes in the dense vegetation.  _ Did you call me back here for this? _

"It's Flint! The ghost of Flint!" the men cry. They squirm and pace, crossing themselves and praying audibly to a God they’ve otherwise disavowed. It is not fear that Silver feels at the phantom voice.  _ Show me. Show me where you are. _

“ _ Fetch aft the rum, Darby! _ ” says the phantom. But no...the words are wrong. Graceless. They said it was rum that killed him. But what men say is hardly the whole truth. James was a hundred kinds of desperate when Silver knew him and no doubt the last kind of desperate was reserved for Thomas. It’s a sour sweet thought that comes unbidden. It’s not the rum that’s wrong, it’s the name, it’s the cadence, it’s the voice, it’s the implication. 

Sense overruns madness. Silver quiets the yelling in his mind. It cannot be Flint. He unraveled Flint’s story at its start, twenty years ago and not two miles from where he stands now. It cannot be James. He sailed James to Savannah and out of his mind. “ _Fetch aft the rum,”_ the imposter demands. The prickle of pain in Silver’s chest only serves to make his senses clearer. There is no one here of import. All the ghosts have gone. What the men fear are stories. Silver fires a warning shot. He reigns in the men’s focus. He reminds them that _he_ is the story they fear most. 

They march up the mountain. Trees and ferns become rock and pebble. He thinks about the voice, James' true voice, and it reminds him of what he gave away on this island. He tries not to stumble as he hikes. He tries not to give himself to the ground. It’s a half day’s trek until the mutineers are at the top of the mountain. He ducks into a dank, stony alcove. 

"Here!" yells Hands from the front of the line. The ceiling rises so that each man can stand.

Looking into the empty hole, he feels his leg shake. He sees himself from across the cavern, sunbaked and weary--stupid as the day he was born. Fresh dirt surrounds the chest shaped hole. 

And James comes to him in full detail now, brow slick with sweat, red eyebrows knit, eyes green with pity and despair. “ _ You will. Someday, you will. Someday. Even if you can persuade her to keep you… she’ll no longer be enough. And the comfort will grow stale. And casting about in the dark for some proof that you mattered and finding none, you’ll know that you gave it away, in this moment, on this island. Left it in the ground...along with that chest.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s Note: Treasure Island dialogue is so much more difficult to weave in...but I did try y’all, I did try


	18. Chapter 18

He rows and rows and rows. This far at sea the land on the horizon doesn’t seem to near regardless of how many hours he feels like he’s pumping his arms and leg. 

Cutting through the bulkhead had been work. The hand axe was sharp but loud as she bit into the wooden side of the  _ Hispaniola. _ There were so few men on the ship however, that he had the leisure of time. No one would come down to find him because no one wanted him to be found. So he chips at the bulkhead, little by little. By his estimates they won’t be near Bristol for at least another week and a half. 

It takes him about 9 days and the caution is well worth it. He reaches through the hole and opens the chest so that he can see the treasure he’s been chasing all his life. In his daydreams the gold is bright and shining, glittering in the sun like the first time when he’d stood on the beach next to James and looked down at it crashed over the strand. Here in the belly of the  _ Hispaniola  _ it’s transformed itself into so many pearls and gems and bars.

The black pearls remind him of Max and it’s funny because he can smell Nassau now all fish, and livestock, and sweat, and rum, and piss. The memory of warm sun plays on his neck and shoulders, loosens the tension in his hip. It makes him feel 26 again. It makes him remember the things he thought he'd spend this money on--before he'd bonded with James, before he'd folded himself in with the crew, before he'd met Madi. 

And God what he’s suffered for want of this treasure. How many times have the lives of those he holds most dear been bartered on the back of this chest? A wave of repulsion rakes through him and, for a wild moment, he thinks of hoisting the chest over the edge of the ship and dropping it into Poseidon’s lap. For a wild moment the urge to scream is almost too much to suppress. 

Fingers clutching a handful of pearls Silver rests his head against the bulkhead. He can't go back to how things were before and he doesn't want to. What he wants is to lay barefoot on a white sand beach curled around Madi, watching Flint's green wings circle overhead. What he wants is to root down like a palm tree and never board another ship again. 

He and the bird make landfall with the last breath of twilight. Flint screeches, body weight pushing off against Silver’s shoulder before he takes to the air. Silver leans on a barrel, lapel pulled up over his neck to brace the cold. His bones eased to the warm damp of Skeleton Island and burn now with the return of Bristol’s numbing winds. The potato he bought hot from the dock vendor is already half cold between his fingers. 

Flint returns on Madi’s shoulder, worrying at the tall scarf wrapped around her head. Other than the heavy layers of clothing, Silver swears she looks just like the day they first met. Her affectionate eyes make the winter less cold. He pulls his crutch under his arm and moves to meet her, home in her arms for the first time in months. 

“Why didn’t you wait inside? Your skin is freezing.” He is holding her too tight to allow either of them to move inside the rinky, dockside tavern. She hugs him with equal enthusiasm, fingers holding his face and wandering into his hair and over his back. All the fatigue he’s battled for the last few days catches him. He buries his face into the crook of her neck drinking up her smell. The knowledge that he can sleep again threatens to steal his footing. 

He could have taken a handful of the Tahitian pearls and died as rich as any lord. A score ago, he could have had the whole chest of pearls and two legs. He laughs. At fifty he’s finally touched it and found the luster faded. He rests his free hand on Madi’s back as she leads them into the tavern. In a month they will be back in the Caribbean. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s Note: Well thanks for sticking around friends, hope you enjoyed it. <3


End file.
